I've embedded a browser window in an OBS stream on my mac, and it just about ground my computer to a halt; the CPU was pegged at 100%, and using it with Zoom basically meant not using anything else.
I used to run a daily show off a tricked out MacBook Pro, and it was really problematic (e.g. 30 second delays on live streams). Moved to PC with a good processor and video card, and now it just sips the processor at ~12% with near-live performance. If you use OBS for live streaming, I strongly recommend you move off of Mac, especially if you do anything beyond the most basic operations.
There is a lot that you can do to optimize OBS streams before you may need to jump to Windows, however :)
I’ve got a within-the-last-18-months MacBook Pro, so yeah, your mileage may vary. A dedicated graphics card helps tremendously. I’ve got a gaming PC with a recent NVIDIA card and it does even blink at it.
I haven't tried embedding a browser window in OBS on Mac yet, I'll have to try it.
But you should check to see if you have activated hardware encoding. Go to "Settings" and "Output", select "Output Mode: Advanced" and then in the "Encoder"-dropdown you should now see an option called "Apple VT H264 Hardware Encoder". That should hopefully help somewhat with CPU.
It's just mac. On my Windows desktop OBS purrs like a gentle kitten while streaming games, running Unity, and pulling in windows from 3 4K monitors (and my CPU is from 2014, and a GTX1080).
It crashed the first time I tried to set up the most basic stream on Mac, so I never tried again.
Throttling is one thing that can cause high kernel_task usage, but you can also run ‘pmset -g thermlog’ to verify whether it’s actually due to throttling/cooling issues.
I have the same issue. How do you know if it's throttling and if so what is the action to take? My fairly recent Mac is completely failing at doing video, while my 2012 I dragged out of storage has no issue.
The command’s output is pretty straightforward. It tells you the percentage of CPU you have available to use. Leave it running and try something super intensive. It’s much easier to get my Intel MBA to throttle than my work-provided 16” MBP.
Is it just me?