Overlays that don't slow your stream down

Your Cloud OBS draws your web overlays for you, frame by frame. Most of them cost almost nothing, but some ask for so much work that the server can’t keep up: your stream starts to stutter and the overlays themselves start to skip.

What costs and what doesn’t

What weighs is not how many overlays you have, but how much they move and how much of the screen they cover. An overlay only costs while it’s being redrawn: if it’s standing still, it barely costs anything.

Overlay	Cost	Why
Chat, alerts, latest follower, clock	Low	They sit still most of the time and only redraw when something changes
Small widgets: speed, heart rate, battery	Low	They’re small and update once a second
A minimap that never stops moving	Medium	It redraws every frame, even if it’s small
Full-screen video with transparency (WebM)	High	Every frame has to be decoded and blended with your picture
3D effects (WebGL)	High	They paint the whole screen every frame
Full-screen animated frames and effects	Very high	Spinning borders, particles, shimmer: the whole canvas redraws non-stop

In our tests, a single full-screen animated frame cost more than the chat, the alerts, a minimap and a telemetry widget put together. If your stream stutters, that’s the first thing to remove.

How to set them up so they stay light

1. Size the source to the widget, not to the canvas. If your chat sits in a corner, make the browser source the size of that corner instead of a 1920×1080 one with the chat inside: whenever something changes, the whole rectangle of the source gets redrawn.
2. Let animations start and finish. An alert that slides in, shows off and leaves is fine. A shimmer running across your goal bar non-stop, a spinning border or particles floating for the whole stream are paid for on every frame.
3. One overlaid video, at most. Several videos with transparency at once add up. If you want rain, snow or an animated frame, pick one.
4. Test before you go live. Add the overlay, do a short test stream and check that it plays smoothly. If it stutters, take it off and compare.

On OBS Basic

OBS Basic has no remote desktop: your overlays are the ones in the Scenes tab, and among them Your overlay, the one on top of your camera. That one is on air for the whole stream, so it’s the one that counts most: keep it to a Low cost in the table above. What weighs is what the URL you paste carries: if it’s a full-screen animated frame, it weighs just the same.

Next step

• Scenes and overlays — turn the overlays on or off, or use your own URL.
• Your overlay on top of the camera — on OBS Basic, your alerts and your chat on top of your picture.
• The remote desktop — add and adjust your browser sources from OBS, on Standard and Pro.