If I have broadcasting for friends only enabled, will it consume resources when nobody is watching?

[TheSambassador]

Title basically. If I have broadcasting for friends only enabled, will it consume resources when nobody is watching? I like the option to let my friends easily watch me if I'm playing a game, but I don't really want it to be doing all the encoding/streaming stuff if nobody is watching. Does it only start consuming resources if somebody is watching?

[crunchyfrog]

If you're broadcasting, it doesn't care who is watching. It doesn't work like that.

Resources are proportionate to the number watching.

Think of the analogy in TV. If you broadcast a TV programme, it costs x amount of power and resources. The number of people receiving that doesn't affect it one way or another.

Better still, think of it this way. You're in a crowd of friends who are quite close. You say something. Does your voice get louder dependent on the number of people listening? (And no, I'm talkig about if theyre too far away).

Of course it doesn't.

You are putting out ONE broadcast. Whoever "tunes in" is immaterial.

[TheSambassador]

My question isn't "does broadcasting to more people consume more resources".

My question is "is my game broadcasting even with 0 viewers".

When you are broadcasting, it makes sense that resources (CPU, GPU, RAM, etc) are consumed to produce the stream. It has to encode the game capture and stream it.

If I start up a game and nobody is watching, is my computer still using those resources to encode the video, even if nobody is watching the stream?

Or... when I start up a game, does the broadcasting have no overhead UNTIL somebody starts watching? And then, at that point, does broadcasting "start"?

[ГАШИШБАЕР]

ав

[Dr.Shadowds 🐉]

If you're limited on data, and worry about going over your plan, why you want to Stream??? If that what you're talking about.


If you're talking about hardware usage, it doesn't affect your performance really, until you start live stream when gray dot goes to red dot. If you have high end system then don't worry about it really, but for low end systems, or old systems then this may become a problem to you and can affect performance.

[adv]

gg

[adderall enjoyer]

Hello

[adderall enjoyer]

Howareu?

[TheSambassador]

I don't care about bandwidth, but streaming in general definitely has the potential to drain some performance. I play a lot of VR games and am wondering if I need to turn the feature off (even though 90% of the time nobody is watching). All I'm trying to figure out is if the streaming feature is using computer resources before anybody actually starts watching.

[Dr.Shadowds 🐉]

Originally posted by TheSambassador:

I don't care about bandwidth, but streaming in general definitely has the potential to drain some performance. I play a lot of VR games and am wondering if I need to turn the feature off (even though 90% of the time nobody is watching). All I'm trying to figure out is if the streaming feature is using computer resources before anybody actually starts watching.

Answer is no.