The best OBS settings for streaming Marvel Rivals are a 60 fps output at 1080p (or 936p if you are capped at 6,000 kbps), CBR rate control, your GPU’s hardware encoder on a quality preset, a 2-second keyframe interval, and an in-game frame cap that leaves the graphics card some headroom for OBS. Marvel Rivals is one of the harder games to stream cleanly because team fights fill the whole screen with particles, portals, destruction and ultimates at the same moment, so the settings below are tuned for those worst-case seconds rather than for quiet spawn-room footage.
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Top 3 picks at a glance
Recommended OBS settings at a glance
Start from these values, then adjust using the troubleshooting section. Everything lives under Settings > Output (set Output Mode to Advanced) and Settings > Video.
| Setting | Twitch (standard) | Twitch Enhanced Broadcasting | YouTube |
|---|---|---|---|
| Output resolution | 1664×936 or 1920×1080 | Auto (up to 1440p for Partners and Affiliates) | 1920×1080 or 2560×1440 |
| Frame rate | 60 | 60 | 60 |
| Codec | H.264 | Chosen by Twitch (H.264 to 1080p, HEVC for 1440p) | AV1 or HEVC if your GPU supports it, otherwise H.264 |
| Rate control | CBR | Automatic | CBR |
| Video bitrate | 6,000 kbps | Up to 7,500 kbps at 1080p, 9,000 kbps at 1440p | About 12,000 kbps (AV1/HEVC) or about 17,000 kbps (H.264) for 1080p60 |
| Keyframe interval | 2 s | Automatic | 2 s |
| Audio | AAC, 160 kbps, 48 kHz | AAC, 160 kbps, 48 kHz | AAC, 128–160 kbps, 48 kHz |
The Twitch limits come from Twitch’s standard 6,000 kbps guideline and its June 2026 update, which raised Enhanced Broadcasting to 7.5 Mbps for 1080p and 9 Mbps for 1440p. The YouTube figures are the recommended 1080p60 values in YouTube’s live encoder guide. OBS Studio 32.1 and later already default to 6,000 kbps, so a fresh install is close to the Twitch target out of the box.
Why 936p often beats 1080p for Marvel Rivals on Twitch
A fixed bitrate has to be shared across every pixel you send each second. When a Doctor Strange portal opens during a six-ultimate fight, nearly every pixel changes at once, and the encoder runs out of bits before it runs out of detail. The quick way to compare options is bits per pixel: bitrate divided by width x height x frame rate.
| Output | Pixels per second | Bitrate | Bits per pixel |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1920×1080 at 60 fps | 124.4 million | 6,000 kbps | 0.048 |
| 1664×936 at 60 fps | 93.5 million | 6,000 kbps | 0.064 |
| 1280×720 at 60 fps | 55.3 million | 6,000 kbps | 0.109 |
| 1920×1080 at 60 fps (Enhanced Broadcasting) | 124.4 million | 7,500 kbps | 0.060 |
| 1920×1080 at 60 fps (YouTube H.264) | 124.4 million | 17,000 kbps | 0.137 |
Dropping from 1080p to 936p gives each pixel about a third more data, which is usually the difference between a team fight that smears into blocks and one that stays readable. 720p60 is the safe choice if your audience is mostly on phones or your upload is weak. Do not drop to 30 fps to save bits: Marvel Rivals is a third-person shooter with constant camera swings, and 30 fps makes tracking heroes on stream look choppy even when each frame is sharp.
Encoder settings by graphics card
NVIDIA (NVENC)
- Encoder: NVIDIA NVENC H.264 for Twitch; NVENC AV1 on RTX 40 and 50 series for YouTube, NVENC HEVC on older RTX cards.
- Preset: P5 (Slow) as the baseline; P6 (Slower) only if OBS shows no encoding lag during big fights.
- Tuning: High Quality. Multipass: Two Passes (Quarter Resolution).
- Profile: High for H.264. Psycho Visual Tuning: on. Max B-frames: 2.
- Look-ahead: off on a single-PC setup, because it uses the same GPU that is already rendering the game.
AMD (AMF)
- Encoder: AMD HW H.264 for Twitch; AMD HW AV1 or HEVC for YouTube on cards that support them.
- Rate control: CBR. Preset: Quality rather than High Quality, which has been linked to encoder errors on some Radeon RX 9000 setups.
- If AV1 output overshoots your set bitrate, set B-frames to 0; that workaround is widely used for AMD AV1 bitrate spikes.
Intel (QSV)
- Encoder: QuickSync H.264 for Twitch, QuickSync AV1 on Arc cards for YouTube.
- Target Usage: start at TU4 and move toward TU1 for quality only if there is no encoder overload.
- Max B-frames: 2. On a PC with both an Intel iGPU and a discrete card, make sure OBS is using the device you expect.
Video tab: canvas, scaling and color
- Base (Canvas) Resolution: your monitor’s native resolution, such as 2560×1440.
- Output (Scaled) Resolution: 1664×936 or 1920×1080 for Twitch, per the table above.
- Downscale filter: Lanczos for the sharpest UI text and damage numbers; Bicubic if your GPU is already near its limit.
- Common FPS Values: 60.
- Under Advanced: color format NV12, color space Rec. 709, color range Limited. These match what viewers’ players expect and avoid washed-out or crushed colors.
Capturing Marvel Rivals without a black screen
Use a Game Capture source set to “Capture specific window” and pick the Marvel Rivals window. Leave “Use anti-cheat compatibility hook” enabled, which is the OBS default. If the source stays black, the most commonly reported fix is running OBS as administrator, because OBS cannot hook a process running at a higher privilege level than itself. Launch OBS first, then the game, and use borderless or windowed display mode if the hook still will not attach.
If Game Capture still fails after an update, right-click the source, close the hook and capture again. As a fallback, a Window Capture source using the “Windows 10 (1903 and up)” capture method works with the game in borderless mode. On laptops with switchable graphics, set OBS to use the same GPU as the game in Windows graphics settings, or the capture will be blank.
Marvel Rivals uses NetEase’s own kernel-level anti-cheat, and the developers have advised against modifying game files. Get performance from the in-game menus and your GPU driver, not from edited config files.
In-game settings that protect your stream
- Limit FPS: enable it in the Display settings and cap the game so GPU usage sits around 85–90% in fights. For example, a PC that holds 165 fps uncapped on a 144 Hz monitor can be capped near 141 fps. This single step prevents most OBS rendering lag.
- V-Sync: off. Use the frame cap for pacing instead.
- Frame generation: it adds GPU work and does not make a 60 fps stream any smoother, so on a single-PC setup it is usually the first feature to turn off.
- Streaming Mode: found under Settings > Social. It hides names on your screen, and therefore on your stream, but other players in the match can still see yours. Pair it with OBS’s Stream Delay (Settings > Advanced) if stream snipers are a problem in ranked.
Audio setup for team-fight callouts
Set the sample rate to 48 kHz and the streaming audio bitrate to 160 kbps, which is Twitch’s maximum for AAC. For recordings, split audio onto separate tracks: track 1 for the full mix, track 2 for game audio, track 3 for your microphone and track 4 for Discord. Marvel Rivals has loud ultimate voice lines, so add a limiter on the game source at about -6 dB to stop those moments from clipping over your commentary.
Fixing the three OBS warnings you are most likely to see
| OBS stat | What it means | Fix, in order |
|---|---|---|
| Frames missed due to rendering lag | The GPU is at 100% and OBS cannot compose frames | Lower the in-game FPS cap, then lower in-game quality, then switch the downscale filter to Bicubic |
| Frames skipped due to encoding lag | The hardware encoder cannot keep up | Use a faster preset (P6 to P5 to P4), turn off Look-ahead, then reduce output resolution |
| Dropped frames (network) | Your upload cannot sustain the bitrate | Use wired Ethernet, lower bitrate in 500 kbps steps, or try a different ingest server |
Keep the OBS Stats dock open during your first few matches. A clean stream should show zero in all three rows after a full round of team fights, not just in the main menu.
