Best OBS Studio Settings for Streaming: The Ultimate x264 Guide

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You have the skills, the overlay, and the personality. But if your stream looks like a pixelated mess from 2005, viewers won’t stay.

Finding the best OBS settings is a balancing act between quality and performance. While many modern guides focus heavily on NVIDIA’s NVENC encoder, the x264 (CPU) encoder remains the gold standard for pure visual fidelity—if your rig can handle it.

Whether you are running a dual-PC setup or have a beastly CPU like a Ryzen 9 or Intel i9, this guide will break down the ultimate x264 configuration for a crisp, professional broadcast.

Perfect stream settings deserve perfect clips. Once you fix your quality, you need a way to share those high-res moments instantly. We’ll get to that later.

Step 1: The “Output” Tab (Switch to Advanced)

First, open Settings > Output. Change the “Output Mode” from Simple to Advanced. This unlocks the granular control you need.

• Encoder: x264
• Rescale Output: Unchecked (Do your scaling in the “Video” tab to save resources).

Step 2: Rate Control & Bitrate (The Most Critical Step)

This determines how much data you send to Twitch or YouTube.

• Rate Control: CBR (Constant Bitrate). Never use VBR for streaming; it causes instability.
• Bitrate:
  • For 1080p 60fps: 6000 Kbps (Twitch limit) or 8000+ Kbps (YouTube).
  • For 720p 60fps: 4500 Kbps.
• Keyframe Interval: 2 s. (This is non-negotiable. Twitch requires a 2-second keyframe).

Step 3: CPU Usage Preset (Quality vs. Lag)

This setting tells OBS how hard to work your CPU to compress the video.

• slower = Better quality, higher CPU usage.
• faster = Lower quality, lower CPU usage.

The Sweet Spot: veryfast or faster. Unless you have a dedicated streaming PC, going slower than “fast” yields diminishing returns on visual quality while tanking your frame rate.

• Profile: High
• Tune: None (or “Film” for realistic games, “Animation” for 2D games).

Step 4: The “Video” Tab

This is where you define your resolution.

• Base (Canvas) Resolution: Set this to your monitor’s resolution (usually 1920×1080).
• Output (Scaled) Resolution:
  • Use 1920×1080 if you have a strong connection.
  • Use 1664×936 (936p) for a sharp “hack” that looks better than 720p but requires less bitrate than 1080p.
• Downscale Filter: Lanczos (Sharpened scaling, 36 samples).
• Common FPS Values: 60.

Why Your VODs Matter More Than Ever

Now that you have dialed in the best OBS settings, your VODs (Video on Demand) will be crystal clear. This is crucial because your VODs are the raw material for your growth engine.

Pixelated streams result in blurry TikToks. High-quality streams result in viral content.

Instead of letting that high-quality footage sit in your Twitch archive gathering dust, use Eklipse to repurpose it automatically.