A new contender in the high quality streaming field has appeared: Intel! Their current generation of encoder hardware is capable of matching (and sometimes exceeding) the fast preset in x264, while exceeding real-time speeds at that quality. This makes Intel a good alternative to NVIDIA Turing/Ampere GPUs for budget builds, and as such makes Dual-PC streaming far more affordable.

Setting up QuickSync (for Streaming)

At the moment, the only Intel encoder available is the built-in QuickSync H.264 encoder maintained by Intel and the OBS Project team. Using the FFmpeg variant does not improve quality, so it is enough to use the built-in encoder for streaming. Simply select QuickSync H.264 and apply the settings shown below.