The Stats panel

CPU, GPU, frame rate and stream health, and what to do when they're high.

• CPU: the chip shows how busy the whole computer is (where the browser can tell); the number is flint's own share.
• GPU: how much of each frame's time the graphics card spends drawing.
• Render: frames drawn each second, and how many came late.
• Stream: while live, the bitrate going out, QP and the encoder's time per frame. Point at it for the encoder's name and the round trip. Upload-limited means your connection is holding it back; Encoder-limited, your computer.
• QP is how hard the encoder is squeezing each frame: under 25 looks clean, over 35 looks blocky (Blocky). It isn't a setting: it's what fitting the picture into your bitrate costs. Busy pictures (fast, detailed, everything moving) cost the most; Settings › Video & recording › Quality mode (on by default) makes keyframes sharp enough that still parts of the picture (a dark gradient behind your camera) stay smooth between them, and steers the rest of the bitrate to what moves. A low QP on a still picture is normal: there is nothing else to spend the bits on. Twitch caps the bitrate at about 6000 kbps, so 1080p60 only stays crisp for calmer pictures: for fast games or busy shader backgrounds, 1080p30 or 1664×936 at 60 fps look better.
• Adaptive frame rate (Settings › Video & recording, on by default above 30 fps, graphics card only): when the QP stays over 35 for a few seconds, the stream sends half the frames (60 → 30 fps), so each gets twice the bits; once the QP has stayed low for a while it goes back. The Stream tile says 30 fps for quality while it's halved. Recordings keep the full frame rate.
• Warnings while live: when the stream is in trouble (frames dropping, the upload struggling, reconnecting, no sound for 30 seconds, a camera in the live scene stopped), a banner shows above the stage and on your phone remote, with a chime in your headphones (never on stream). Settings › General can also show a system notification while you're in your game.
• Before you go live, the bottom bar says Encoder: GPU (your graphics card will encode the stream) or Encoder: CPU (the processor will, in software), for the video size and frame rate you've chosen; Settings › Video & recording says more, and Pick for me takes it into account.
• Software encoder: the stream is being encoded on the processor (Chrome's OpenH264) instead of your graphics card, and looks much worse for the same bitrate, above all at 1080p60. flint encodes on the graphics card itself where the browser lets it (Settings › Video & recording › Encode the stream on my graphics card, on by default; the Stream tile then ends in GPU; CPU means software). If it still says software, check chrome://gpu (Video Acceleration Information should list an H.264 encoder), update your graphics driver, and make sure Settings › System › Use graphics acceleration is on. Until then, 720p60 or 1080p30 look far better.

If things are struggling, see choppy stream.

Dropped frames (under the tiles): every frame that didn't make it out since you last clicked the number: drawn late because the computer was busy, skipped while the graphics card caught up, or not ready in time to send. While you're live or recording, anything above 0 turns red and blinks; click the number to acknowledge it (back to 0). Hover it to see which kind.

Dropped frames can leave the picture a little behind the sound. Resync (while live) lines them up again straight away, without reconnecting: the frames that queued up are dropped and the stream starts again from a fresh keyframe. flint also does this by itself once the picture is more than a set amount behind (Settings › Video & recording › Keep the picture in step with the sound: 66 ms, two frames at 30 fps, unless you change it). Both work when the graphics card encodes the stream.

Related guides

• Choppy, blurry or lagging stream: Too much for your connection or your computer: here's how to tell and fix it.
• Video size, frame rate and bitrate: What 720p, 1080p, 30/60 fps and kbps mean, and what to pick.

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