A good streaming PC must meet certain PC system requirements for live streaming on Twitch, YouTube and Discord. Internet and hardware in particular are crucial for you as a streamer.
We’ll tell you the most important requirements that your streaming PC must meet for your live shows on Twitch, YouTube and Discord. (Source: depositphotos.com / romankosolapov)
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Streaming equipment: camera, microphone, screen
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Hardware for live streaming
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The choice of streaming software
- How many MBits do you need to stream?
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Streaming with the smartphone: only an emergency solution?
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Buy a streaming PC or build it yourself?
- How expensive is a good streaming PC?
The picture freezes constantly, a black screen in between and after a while the stream including the streaming software even crashes completely. You would hardly watch a streamer with such problems more often, let alone regularly. If you stream yourself, you can do better.
All you have to do is find out about the requirements that are placed on your PC when streaming on Twitch, streaming on YouTube and streaming on Discord. If your PC meets the requirements of the respective platform, crashes, stutters and freezes are hardly a problem.
Streaming equipment: camera, microphone, screen
Depending on the requirements of your live stream, a simple PC is sufficient. If you also want to show yourself in your live stream, for example with a facecam, your PC must either have a built-in webcam or you can connect your computer to an external camera.
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For the best possible sound, you still need an external microphone or alternatively a headset. Logically, if you want to stream gameplay from a console, you need the appropriate device and the game you want to stream (digital or physical version).
Many professional streamers use a second screen for live streaming. For example, they can follow the viewer chat parallel to the stream. However, a second screen is a big investment and especially at the beginning of your streamer career you can easily get by with one screen.
Hardware for live streaming
Basically, your PC should have an operating system that is as up-to-date as possible. For Windows users, Windows 7 is the bare minimum. Mac users should use at least MacOS 10.11 or higher. For smartphones, iOS 10 or higher or Android 5 or higher is recommended.
Live streaming just from your camera requires less power than if you want to additionally stream gameplay from a PC game, for example. (Source: depositphotos.com / Estradaanton)
The CPU, the GPU (graphics processor) and the main memory should also meet certain minimum requirements. If you only want to stream a single camera shot, such as a facecam shot, the requirements are relatively low.
The situation is different if you want to stream a PC game. In this case, the hardware is additionally loaded by the display of the video game. In order for everything to be streamed smoothly and without problems, the GPU, for example, has to do a lot more.
The table below shows the minimum requirements your PC should have for streaming with a camera and for streaming gameplay. If your computer meets these requirements, hardware-related problems with the stream cannot be ruled out, but are rather unlikely.
Hardware: PC requirements for live streaming
| Hardware | Streaming via camera | Stream via camera with gameplay |
|---|---|---|
| CPU (processor) | Intel Core i5 or AMD Ryzen 7 | Intel Core i9 or AMD Ryzen 9 |
| GPU (Graphicprocessor) | Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 or AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT | Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 6800 |
| random access memory | at least 8GB | at least 16GB |
PC requirements for live streaming
The specifications for CPU and GPU are recommendations. Of course, you can alternatively use equivalent or better components.
Hardware: Streaming via graphics card
To relieve your processor, you can alternatively stream via your computer’s graphics card. To do this, however, you need a tool like Nvidia NVENC, which you can use to outsource the video coding for your streams to the GPU, i.e. the graphics card.
If you have an AMD graphics card, you can use the comparable tool AMD VCE. However, according to several users, it doesn’t quite match the Nvidia counterpart. Newer graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD offer the corresponding encoders without an additional download.
If you have downloaded the current driver for your graphics card, you should be able to switch to the encoder in the video settings of your streaming software. If the encoders don’t appear there as an option, your graphics card probably doesn’t support them.
Streaming via the graphics card and the associated relief for the CPU is particularly advantageous when streaming complex PC games. If your CPU is used both by a complex game and by a streaming program running at the same time, the worst case scenario can be a system crash.
The disadvantage: With this method you have to accept a significant loss of quality when displaying the game. This is particularly noticeable in very complex 3D games. However, graphics cards are getting better and better and some particularly powerful copies on the market can now even compensate for these losses.
We can only recommend streaming via the graphics card without hesitation if you either have a particularly powerful (and usually very expensive) GPU or if your computer processor is too weak to run PC games and streaming software at the same time.
On the next page we will look at the requirements of the streaming software and what is probably the most important condition for your live streams to run flawlessly. What is meant is the necessary internet speed.
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