Most of the dedicated capture cards do have their own encoders built in, but honestly the thing to do is to just put the capture card in a second computer like SLIN said.

Great for local recording, given the bitrate, but still garbage for streaming. I use it all the time on my 970 which has the highest end version of NVENC to date.

basically my thoughts too, there's an update that breaks HUDs at least every three or four days. which is cool, love the work valve, just makes it hard on HUD developers to stay consistently updated.

my life is going fine, just busy is all.

thank you for carrying on Linus' Define R4 legacy.

Don't bother with NVENC for streaming. In 90% of games (those with movement) it's garbage because of bitrate.

x264 is pretty much it when it comes to streaming. With a desktop i5 I would attempt 720p60 or 1080p30 but wouldn't vary from that, and you might even have trouble with 720p60. You'd need a desktop i7 for rock-solid 720p60 stability. I wouldn't even attempt 1080p60 without an enthusiast 6core+HT i7.

If you're recording locally, NVENC is fine if you turn the bitrate up to around 50mbps.

Have you tried lowering the process priority of OBS?

TF2 is very CPU-bound and only actually utilizes a few threads. If OBS has a spike in usage and starts using the same core as TF2, it might cause those hitches that are short enough that the framerate doesn't seem to be affected because it's hurting frame times more than frame rates.

At this point it's very clearly an OBS issue that TF2 is more prone to being affected by than other games. All the other games you listed, while being CPU-bound, are fairly heavily multithreaded and wouldn't be affected by a spike in usage on one thread as much.

see post #3

Aero is in everything after 7. Aero isn't necessarily the theme - it's really called Desktop Compositing. Aero Extensions are an option in the TF2 advanced video options menu. They should be turned on at all times in DX9.

For the sake of testing, can you downclock the PG279Q to 120Hz, or disconnect the second monitor? One or the other, doesn't matter which.

The ThinkPad line is for business customers - IdeaPads are for consumers. They have an entire gaming series.

I don't see how that's a step down for TF2. It literally has the same i7-6700HQ with a weaker GPU, but TF2 doesn't give a shit about your GPU.

Definitely a TF2 issue then.

Are you running it in DX8?

If you're in DX9, do you have Aero Extensions enabled?

Do you run in full screen, windowed, or a borderless window?

Do you have multiple monitors? What's the refresh rate on each one?

I don't feel okay with asking for donations for something I don't work on actively.

you probably have a separate shadow label that you need to make invisible too

sorry guys, I've just had a lot going on in my life recently and I haven't really been able to set aside time to delve through like ten different diffs and hunt down all the reasons it's crashing

dare i ask

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luUebLAIgIE