Comment by QuantumNomad_

Another feature of this is that if your primary PC crashes, which happens sometimes especially with some games, your stream doesn’t go down too. This is more important for streams with more viewers and longer runtimes, as restarting the stream drops all the AFK viewers who may still be contributing ad revenue (or just boosting active viewer count which has other flow on benefits too).

You can see this effect in long streamathons/subathons as twitch automatically kills long streams so you’ll see multiday streams get cut up either manually by streamers or automatically by twitch every 24h or so, and the viewer count drops significantly and takes quite some time (many hours) to recover.

YouTube recompresses everything anyway so I found the higher quality you upload the better the result, especially for complex stuff like high-paced gameplay.

And at very high bitrates nvenc quality is just fine. It's mostly at the lower bitrates x264 really shines.

Of course for livestreaming there are different constraints.

Yeah that makes sense. I was thinking that the two computer setup was also something they did to keep their streaming stuff completely separate from the rest of their life, to not accidentally doxx themselves on-stream and to not accidentally execute malware on the same host they do their email and banking etc on.

Additionally, running on a different computer allows for eg adjusting scenes in OBS or moderating Twitch, without losing focus from the running app/game.