Streaming / Encoding performance on laptop i7s

Hello there,

I've been looking at Clevo/Sager recently with the intent of getting a laptop that is capable of streaming 1080p / 720p while gaming. I wasn't able to find any hits via the search, so I was wondering if anyone here had done anything relatively similar with the quad core i7 chips. Tentatively I'm looking at the 2760qm / 6990m combination on a p150hm.

While I'm here, I read the FAQ but was wondering if people had a comparison of the different warranties/services/other that differentiate the resellers?

Thanks!

 

I would be surprised if there were any benchmarks for that. However, I'd say it depends on the game and the settings you're running (and whether you're on AC or battery). I personally stream Netflix HD on a second monitor all the time when gaming on my P150HM (2720QM/485m), and I've never noticed an issue. Others might have more definitive results to post though.

Other than the FAQ, you may just want to contact resellers directly for questions or check through the reviews on the reseller page.

Reseller Feedback Forum

 

Woops, I guess streaming is a bit ambiguous. What I meant was livestreaming the game being played to justin.tv. On my desktop i5-760 with a 460, I can stream 720p at about 25fps reasonably well while playing SC2 on Ultra at 1080p game resolution. I was hoping that with a quad core (albeit mobile), I could do higher graphics quality with the extra cores handling the real-time encoding.

 

That should work.

The 2760 and 6990M are quite a step up from the 760 and 460M.

Mr. Mysterious

 

Hmm, it's a 460 desktop gfx card, not a 460m. I haven't seen any relevant comparisons from the desktop to laptop versions that I can extrapolate to streaming performance. It seems like with the 6990m I'll be set on that side, though. More wondering about the 2760qm being able to run sc2 and encode simultaneously. Do you know if the cores individually are about on par / better / worse?

Thanks for the response

 

The 2760QM should be 20-40% faster than the 760 on average. You can compare the 2760 and the 750 on this chart (the 760 isn't listed, but it should be very similar to the 750)

Mobile Processors - Benchmarklist - Notebookcheck.net Tech

As for the 6990 versus desktop 460, the 6990 is a bit faster. The 6970 is approximately equal to the 460 while the 6990 is closer to the 560ti (similar to the 580m in performance).

Mobile Graphics Cards - Benchmark List - Notebookcheck.net Tech

 

Surely the intel igp would do the streaming on the i7 as it is does not need a lot of resources while the 6990m does the main workload for the gaming session ???

@OP, You would need more ram for streaming or good 1080i/p steaming + 1 or more ssd's with 65k or more iops just to be safe, how the streaming app you are using will work with ram, buffering, cpu cycles is a good guess.
Or as close to this as your budget can get you.

2x ssd in raid0 or part of it in LVM raid0 where the game files is on would be ideal if possible. Same for normal 2x rotational if budget is tight.

You should be able to with a program or manually set both the game and streaming app affinity for best results. On a quad the 1st core or core0 is always windows life line so try not to use it for gaming / streaming, 2nd or core1 and 4th or core3 can be used for SC2 and 3rd core2 used for the steaming app.
( 0"xp/win7", 1"sc2", 2"stream", 3"sc2" ) offsetting the cpu load usually works better for heat distribution as well.

This way you should get best results and least lag even if SC2 only uses 1 core at 100% it is best to manually spread it over 2x cores or more.

This is how we used to do it in the old days for server stability and gaming on the same machine with extreme cpu usage.

Please note i7 has some funny load and turbo boost business that might cause the cpu or core/s not to run at max , you will need to compensate for this or find a way to make it work for you.

 

Oh nice, thanks for the charts and build advice.

My streaming software (XSplit) doesn't support Intel quicksync, unfortunately. Most of the streaming solutions I've seen use x264 which they haven't figured out yet for quicksync. Hopefully they'll get it working later down the line.

 

The Intel IGP is not connected or useful on any of the non-Optimus models. If the OP is looking at the P151HM1 or higher, it will be unavailable. Only on the W150HR or lower will the IGP be able to do anything useful.

 

Yes, widi is not recommended for what you're doing.

How do you plan to stream? What does the XSplit do?

Mr. Mysterious

 

@Mr. Mysterious - XSplit captures video/image sources from desktop/games/media on disk/other streams and then encodes them and streams them to sites like Justin.tv/UStream/RTMP servers. (Head over to Justin.tv, and you'll see what I mean if you haven't checked it out)

@MALIBAL - Thanks for the heads up. I gave up on hoping for the IGP stuff to work, so not a big loss.

 

if u still want the igp then u can get an alienware, but if its not a big problem then stick with a clevo.