About Twitch lagging
No one wants to watch a laggy stream on Twitch. The audience will not mind watching your competitor who is streaming similar content but without lagging. For retaining & growing your audience on Twitch, you need to provide them smooth, buffer-free streaming experience. If you are asking why my Twitch streaming is lagging, we have a checklist that can help you in fixing the laggy Twitch stream.Simply go through every point mentioned below and by the end of this article, you will have smooth Twitch streaming for your audience.Also See: Best Gaming Laptop under $1000Why is My Twitch Stream Lagging?In the first part of this article, we are going to give you reasons why your Twitch stream is lagging. There are a lot of things that go at the backend and if anything goes south, your Twitch stream will lag.1. Poor Upload SpeedThe base of any LIVE streaming is the internet. No matter how expensive your rig is, if your ISP is providing you with inconsistent internet speed, you will not be able to stream on Twitch. When we talk about internet speed while streaming, we are more interested in Upload speed rather than download speed.Basically, you are uploading data on the internet in the form of video and audio. For lag-free Twitch streaming at 720p resolution, make sure you have at least 5Mbps upload speed. You can use tools like Speedtest.net by Ookla or Fast.com by Netflix to check the internet speed or upload speed to be precise. If your Internet has poor upload speed, your Twitch stream will lag.2. PC/Laptop is Not Powerful EnoughStreaming is a hardware-intensive task that requires high-performance CPU, RAM, storage, and GPU. If your PC doesn’t have the required hardware for streaming at a certain video quality, your Twitch stream will lag. The laptop or PC you are using for Twitch streaming must have a powerful CPU with additional cores, high-performance RAM, and a dedicated GPU for handling all the graphics and stream encoders.See Also: Best Laptop for Music ProductionTwitch has its own basic requirements that must be fulfilled to even start streaming. Any incompetent hardware in your rig will not be able to provide smooth buffer-free streaming.3. Over or Under optimized Stream SettingsIf you have a powerful PC/Laptop and high-speed internet connection but your Twitch stream is constantly buffering and lagging, there must be some error in the stream settings. Your stream settings might be over-optimized or under-optimized which is causing lag in your Twitch stream.When we talk about LIVE stream settings for Twitch, we mean video bitrate, audio bitrate, encoder preset, stream server, FPS, video resolution etc. There is no one set number for bitrate or stream server that is suitable for
Key features of the Twitch lagging that are enabled through these drivers include:
- Lagging stream : r/Twitch - Reddit
- Twitch lagging? : r/starcraft - Reddit
- Malwarebytes extension on chrome lagging twitch
- Lag on xbox : r/Twitch - Reddit
- lag and slow : r/Twitch - Reddit
- Lag for viewers : r/Twitch - Reddit
- How to Fix Twitch Stream Lagging or
The new gen M.2 SSD has a reading speed of up to 3Gbps to 7Gbps which is insanely fast. All the new-gen laptops are equipped with NVMe M.2 SSDs for the best possible performance.If you don’t want to upgrade the inbuilt HDD to SSD, you can get portable external SSD from Western Digital, SanDisk or Seagate.6. Close all the Running ProgramsBefore you finally go LIVE on Twitch, make sure you close all the unnecessary programs running in the background. Once you close all these programs, it will offload the CPU and RAM and you will be able to utilize its resources for smooth Twitch streaming without any buffering.To close the running programs in Windows, press Ctrl + Shift + Esc and it will open Task Manager or simply right-click on the ‘Start’ button on Windows and go to ‘Task Manager’. In the Processes tab, you will see a list of programs that are running. Close all the programs that you don’t need for gaming or streaming. Here are more ways you can try to boost your Windows PC speed and performance.If you are using Anti-Virus, make sure you disable it before going Live on Twitch or just uninstall it completely. Some Anti-Virus also comes with Gaming Mode and you can activate it so that it doesn’t block anything while streaming and gaming.No More Stream Lagging on Twitch: Final WordsNow you have everything using which you can debug the stream lagging issue on Twitch. You also got the easy solutions to fix the stream lagging on Twitch. There is no hard and fast rule for smooth streaming. You have to follow the ‘Hit & Trial’ approach for getting the best settings and hardware requirements for smooth Twitch streaming.Just make sure you have a strong basic architecture that includes a powerful PC/Laptop and a high-speed internet connection. Once you have these 2 things, you can easily optimize the OBS or any other streaming software for lag-free streaming on Twitch.
