Long story short: Across a variety of hardware setups with the hugely powerful RTX 5090, from mid-range to high-powered CPUs, you’re going to see a predictable drop of about 10-15 percent while running an OBS stream, even without other tools. That’s a pretty substantial hit. And with an older or less-powerful card, which the vast majority of PC gamers have, you can expect a bigger ding to your framerate.
It’s a much bigger hit to performance than Will was expecting. It’s enough that you might consider running a dedicated stream manager PC, at least if you happen to have one available — an older gaming desktop build, for example. That’s especially true if you’re trying to play competitive online games. But if you’re setting up a streaming system right now, when PC hardware has never been more expensive, it might be worth the sacrifice.
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