Streaming – play and create simultaneously. Where do you need powerful CPU, apart from games?

CPU power is important when playing, but if you want to stream your gameplay, you can talk about a completely different computer load. It's been said that when broadcasting, the computer is strained as if you were playing two games at once – one for yourself and the other for viewers. This is a simplification and it's not even all that true considering the encoding that's popular today (which significantly reduces CPU usage in streaming).

You need more than your average hardware for streaming. Source: Unsplash

However, it cannot be denied that the CPU load increases significantly when sharing the screen. For home-grown streamers, popular gaming processors like Ryzen 5 5600 from AMD should be sufficient. More advanced streamers may be looking towards high-end chips, such as Ryzen 7/9.

In addition, you usually have more programs running when streaming; more than just the game and streaming software. Creators most often open a chat with viewers in a separate window, they also often use a browser and do various other things on the PC. Cheaper and weaker processors may simply fail, which will result in lag or stuttering stream.