Best OBS Settings for Streaming Arc Raiders in 2026

Arc Raiders, released in October 2025 by Embark Studios, became the biggest extraction-genre hit of 2026 on Twitch. It is a beautiful game to stream and a sneaky-difficult one to stream well. The large open maps are covered in grass and foliage, which is one of the most compression-hostile things in video, and the fights against ARC machines fill the screen with sparks, tracers, and debris. Get OBS wrong and your stream looks fine in a bunker and turns to mush the moment you step into a meadow. Here is the setup that avoids that.

Quick Answer

Arc Raiders sits in the moderate-to-high motion tier: calmer than a battle royale on average, but with vegetation and robot fights that spike well above it.

Why Arc Raiders Is Tough on Encoders

Extraction shooters have a deceptive rhythm. Long quiet stretches of looting compress easily, then the hard parts hit all at once:

• Grass and foliage are the classic encoder killer. Thousands of thin blades swaying independently create fine detail that changes every frame, and H.264 responds by smearing it into green soup when bitrate runs short.

• Large open maps mean wide sightlines. Every camera pan shifts a huge amount of visible terrain, trees, and skybox at once.

• ARC machine fights stack particle effects: muzzle flash, rockets, shield sparks, explosions, and smoke, often against that same busy vegetation backdrop.

• Weather and dust effects add semi-transparent layers that are expensive to encode cleanly.

The result is a game that looks acceptable at mid bitrates until the exact moments your viewers care about, third-party fights and last-second extractions, where quality craters. Plan for those peaks. The background on how motion and detail drive bitrate demand is in our best OBS bitrate settings guide.

Recommended OBS Settings by Platform

Twitch (6,000 Kbps cap)

• Resolution: 1920x1080

• FPS: 60

• Encoder: NVENC (New), H.264

• Preset: P5 (Slow)

• Rate Control: CBR

• Bitrate: 6,000 Kbps

• Keyframe Interval: 2 seconds

• Profile: High

• B-frames: 2

At 6,000 Kbps, 1080p60 handles most of Arc Raiders well, with softness limited to dense grass during fast movement. If you sprint through fields constantly, 720p60 at the same bitrate keeps foliage readable. Full ingest details are on the Twitch platform page.

YouTube Live

• 1080p 60fps: 9,000 to 12,000 Kbps

• 1440p 60fps: 15,000 Kbps if your upload supports it

• Encoder: NVENC H.264, or NVENC AV1 on RTX 40/50 series cards

• Keyframe Interval: 2 seconds

Arc Raiders' painterly art style rewards the extra bitrate. At 9,000+ Kbps, the landscapes that make the game distinctive actually survive compression.

Kick

Kick accepts around 8,000 Kbps. Run 7,000 to 8,000 Kbps at 1080p60, and use AV1 if your GPU offers it; AV1 handles fine foliage detail noticeably better than H.264 at the same bitrate.

Encoder Settings

NVENC (NVIDIA GPU): Recommended

NVENC is the recommended encoder for Arc Raiders. The game itself is GPU-heavy, but the encoder chip is separate silicon, so streaming does not cost you meaningful frames:

• Rate Control: CBR

• Bitrate: 6,000 Kbps (Twitch) or 9,000+ (YouTube)

• Preset: P5 (Slow), or P4 if the GPU sits at 99% and OBS warns of overload

• Profile: High

• Look-ahead: Off

• Psycho Visual Tuning: On

• B-frames: 2

x264 (CPU) Fallback

If you stream from a dual-PC setup or have no modern GPU encoder:

• Preset: Medium on a Ryzen 7/9 or Core i7/i9; Fast otherwise

• Bitrate: same as NVENC

• Profile: High

For a single-PC setup, the decision is not close: take NVENC. Our NVENC vs x264 for streaming comparison explains why the old x264 quality advantage has essentially disappeared on current cards.

In-Game Settings That Help Your Stream

Arc Raiders gives you real control over the things that hurt encoders most:

• Vegetation/Foliage Quality: Medium. This is the headline tweak. Medium reduces grass density and draw distance for small plants, which directly cuts the fine moving detail your encoder fights hardest. Viewers will not miss it; your bitrate will thank you.

• Motion Blur: Off. Smears every pan and wastes bits encoding blur.

• Film Grain and Chromatic Aberration: Off. Random noise is pure bitrate cost.

• Volumetric Effects: Medium. Heavy fog and god rays add shifting semi-transparent layers.

• Anti-Aliasing: DLSS or TAA. Stable edges compress far better than shimmering ones.

• Sharpening: moderate. Over-sharpened foliage becomes noise on stream.

Internet Requirements

For Twitch at 6,000 Kbps, you need at least 10 Mbps upload. For YouTube at 9,000 to 12,000 Kbps, aim for 15 to 20 Mbps upload so the stream never saturates your line during a squad fight. Use ethernet; a dropped packet during an extraction timer is a dropped frame for every viewer. To match your bitrate to your actual connection, run it through our streaming bitrate calculator first, and sanity-check the totals with the bandwidth calculator.

Quick Reference Table

FAQ

Why does my Arc Raiders stream look blurry in grassy areas?

Swaying grass is thousands of small independent movements per frame, and the encoder cannot describe them all at 6,000 Kbps. Set vegetation quality to Medium, make sure you are on P5 CBR at the full cap, and the worst of it goes away. YouTube's higher bitrates fix the rest.

Is 30fps acceptable for an extraction shooter stream?

Technically yes, and 1080p30 needs less bitrate, but Arc Raiders fights are fast enough that 60fps is worth it. If you must economize, drop resolution to 720p60 before you drop frame rate.

Bottom Line

Arc Raiders streams beautifully once you respect its two enemies: foliage and firefights. Lock in NVENC P5 at 6,000 Kbps CBR for Twitch, push 9,000+ on YouTube, set vegetation to Medium, and kill motion blur and film grain. Do that and the game's landscapes and ARC battles reach your viewers looking the way Embark intended, not as a green smear with health bars.