MSI X99A Gaming 9 ACK Motherboard Review

Streaming Performance

To test the streaming performance, I launched a session of GTA V and used Xplit Gamecaster set to use the Avermedia Streaming engine and streamed at 1080/30 to twitch. I also tested using the CPU and GPU as a rendering device. I took a snap shot of the router’s network connections during the test to show the bandwidth used while using the streaming engine.

I wanted to illustrate the difference the dedicated hardware can make while streaming. During the test, I had the task manager open on a secondary monitor and observed the CPU and network utilization.  The streaming engine roughly cuts the CPU utilization in 1/2 and sometimes even more. As more objects appeared on screen the CPU streaming configuration would sometimes reach up to 50% utilization where as the avermedia configuration never reached above 20%. The quality of the stream (at the same 1080/30) seemed to be a little better quality than the CPU. However, the maximum the streaming engine can stream is 1080p at 30 frames per second where the CPU can do 1080p at 60 frames per second.

Avermedia Streaming Engine	Streaming via CPU

In the test above, I had manually set the Killer networking software to make Xsplit the highest priority and GTA V as a lower priority. Network traffic from Xsplit was going out through the wired connection and GTA V network traffic used the wireless connection.

Transmit network traffic peaked at just under 20 Mbps and receive traffic was around 5 Mbps.