Arlen

Watch hours is a mysterious figure for most streamers: It’s simply there in the morning when you log onto your dashboard. You roll over and see a single digit, and you’re either victorious or devastated. The trouble with thinking of it as luck of the draw instead of an equation is that you don’t know … Read more

During a raid, you look at your stream dashboard and notice that two hundred viewer have jumped into your stream all at once. You’re stoked! You think to yourself, “I must be killing it!” But then ten minutes later, those viewers trickle out and the number slide back down. In that moment, that spike seems … Read more

Did you know? Even if your bitrate is high, your stream might still appear blocky. While troubleshooting, you think everythings set up correctly, but chat viewers keep complaining about quality. Bitrate isn’t a clear-cut metric because it doesn’t take into consideration differences in resolution. For example, a 1080p video have around four times fewer pixels … Read more

Chances are, you believe that your video library consist only of a bunch of movie files in a directory. Actualy it doesn’t. When you’re serving content to an audience, what’s hidden from sight… But drives your storage footprint, has little to do with the videos themselves. Manifest indexes instructs players to stream without a hiccup. … Read more

But it’s possible to accidently create a huge data burden on your hard drive when you start recording something thinking it’ll be a small file, only to find out later it’s a big one. Why? This happened because you captured video at a high frame rate and didn’t understand how that would work mathematicaly. Usually, … Read more

You’re streaming, and then audio drops out of sync with your words, or the stream starts buffering as you continue to play. That’s bitrate management, you didn’t get it right. Bitrate isn’t a volume dial that you can crank up until it breaks; it’s a balance of how much bandwidth your stream needs versus how … Read more

Add another high-res texture to a character model? Game stutters. Why? Because it’s doing some math, fast, which eat up video memory. There are texture memory calculators out there; human intuition isn’t suited to gigabytes of graphical information inside a GPU. We might think a 4K image looks like any other photo, but to a … Read more

You probably got a solid state drive because it’s fast. Boot up in seconds? Check. Load games quickly? Sure. In the background, however, a clock is ticking down each time you apply an update or save a file to your solid state drive. That’s called TBW (Terabytes Written) and that’s how much data you can … Read more

When you get a shiny new graphics card with promises of silky-smooth frame rates, it stutters in today’s games even though your CPU is sitting there idling away. That kind of frustration are the result of not understanding where a GPU’s bottlenecks lie. Folks tend to think about core count and memory bandwidth while overlooking … Read more

A lot of game memory leaks don’t begin as a rogue pointer here or there, or some forgotten file handle. A lot of them begins when a framebuffer expands beyond its size and consumes video RAM until it’s stuttering. Games have other stuff besides triangles being rendered, but under all that polygonal business there’s a … Read more

The era of setting virtual memory manually is long gone, but the mechanics of how Windows manage physical RAM versus disk storage remain surprisingly complex. There’s an active safety net called the page file that makes sure applications don’t crash by gobbling up all their available resources. You need to understand this balancing act if … Read more

Your frame rate counter probably won’t match what’s stamped on box. We’ve all been trained to look at teraflops like they’re some sort of direct indicator of graphical quality, but the truth is a lot messier then you could sum up in a single headline figure. A raw compute metric indicate how many floating point … Read more