I’m using an AMD system as an OBS Studio streaming system, and Linux was not great.
I first set it up with a Ryzen 5 3600 and Radeon HD 6750, running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, because I thought I didn’t really need that much processing power. After un-blacklisting the driver for such an old GPU, I discovered I was using upwards of 80% CPU and dropping frames while streaming at 1440p, so I decided to upgrade.
Then, I tried a Ryzen 7 5700g with integrated Vega 8. First, I needed to upgrade to Ubuntu 21.10 for such a new GPU, and then OBS Studio was randomly crashing while switching between scenes. Also, hardware video encoding wasn’t working well, so it was still taking upwards of 80% CPU while streaming at 1440p. And the video outputs were finicky, sending windows to the wrong screen on power up. Random crashing is unusable, so I switched to Windows.
With Windows 11 on the Ryzen 7 5700g, the hardware video encoding works well, so the same scenes are taking less than 50% CPU while streaming at 4K (2160p) and not dropping any frames. Now I can do other things on the stream.
I’m sorry you went through all that. I’m not going to ask you to switch back to Linux, but it might be worth filing a bug report with Ubuntu about this, since I doubt you are the only person who wants to use a Linux computer to stream video.
I used OBS when I was on Linux and it worked exactly as I wanted it to, but I’ll concede that I 1) wasn’t gaming and b) was using software encoding.
I first set it up with a Ryzen 5 3600 and Radeon HD 6750, running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, because I thought I didn’t really need that much processing power. After un-blacklisting the driver for such an old GPU, I discovered I was using upwards of 80% CPU and dropping frames while streaming at 1440p, so I decided to upgrade.
Then, I tried a Ryzen 7 5700g with integrated Vega 8. First, I needed to upgrade to Ubuntu 21.10 for such a new GPU, and then OBS Studio was randomly crashing while switching between scenes. Also, hardware video encoding wasn’t working well, so it was still taking upwards of 80% CPU while streaming at 1440p. And the video outputs were finicky, sending windows to the wrong screen on power up. Random crashing is unusable, so I switched to Windows.
With Windows 11 on the Ryzen 7 5700g, the hardware video encoding works well, so the same scenes are taking less than 50% CPU while streaming at 4K (2160p) and not dropping any frames. Now I can do other things on the stream.