How to skip/minimize encoding workload in OBS?
If you're streaming, OBS will re-encode the output each time.
You can stream and record to disk at the same time,
However, there's no way to &quot;replay&quot; that data directly to YouTube, it must be re-encoded.
I notice that you have your stream encoder set to Software x264 which is CPU based.
I also noticed that your recording encoder is set to NVENC which is GPU based.
If you use NVENC as your stream encoder, it can offload encoding from the CPU to the GPU, which could drastically reduce your CPU load.
However, the CPU load maybe coming from the decoding of the video file your trying to playback so you may not be able to reduce it massively but NVENC will definitely help.