Hollow Knight: Silksong finally landed in September 2025 and instantly became one of the biggest indie launches ever, which means thousands of people are streaming it right now with settings copied from shooter guides. Good news: Silksong is one of the easiest games to stream well. Its hand-drawn 2D art compresses beautifully at bitrates that would ruin a battle royale, making it a perfect game for low-end PCs and slower connections. The one thing you cannot compromise on is frame rate.
Quick Answer
Stream Hollow Knight: Silksong at 1080p 60fps with 4,500-5,000 Kbps CBR on Twitch using NVENC preset P5, keyframe interval 2 seconds, and the Lanczos downscale filter to keep the line art crisp. 60fps is mandatory; the bitrate is negotiable.That is 1,000-1,500 Kbps less than a shooter needs at the same resolution, and the stream will still look essentially lossless.
Why Silksong Is Easy on Bitrate but Strict on Frame Rate
2D games are a gift to video encoders, and Silksong is a textbook case:
- Flat, hand-drawn art with large uniform regions. Backgrounds, fog, and Hornet's sprite are smooth shapes with clean gradients, not noisy 3D textures. Encoders represent this kind of image with very little data, so 4,000-5,000 Kbps at 1080p 60fps genuinely looks perfect.
- Parallax scrolling is predictable motion. The layered backgrounds slide horizontally at fixed rates, which is exactly what motion vectors were designed for. Compare that to a 3D camera rotating through foliage and it is night and day.
- Crisp line art is the one fragile element. Silksong's thin black outlines and white sprite highlights are high-contrast edges, and edges are where compression artifacts show first. This is why the Lanczos downscale filter and a non-starved bitrate matter more than raw resolution.
- Fast, precise combat demands 60fps. Boss fights are built on tight dodge and parry windows. At 30fps, Hornet's needle attacks and dash cancels look stuttery and viewers cannot follow the fight. The frame budget you save on bitrate should be spent here. If you are weighing the tradeoff, our 30fps vs 60fps streaming comparison settles it: for a game this fast, 60fps every time.
For the broader picture of matching bitrate to content, see 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: 4,500-5,000 Kbps
- Keyframe Interval: 2 seconds
- Profile: High
- B-frames: 2
- Downscale Filter: Lanczos
You can run the full 6,000 Kbps if you have the upload to spare, but the visible difference for a 2D game is small. The saved bandwidth buys you stability instead. Ingest details live on the Twitch platform page.
YouTube Live
- 1080p 60fps: 6,000-8,000 Kbps (diminishing returns above this for 2D art)
- 1440p 60fps: 12,000 Kbps if you play at high resolution and want maximum edge sharpness
- Encoder: NVENC P5, or NVENC AV1 on RTX 40-series cards
Silksong is one of the few games where you do not need YouTube's bitrate ceiling. Spend the headroom on 1440p if your monitor supports it; the line art scales up gorgeously.
Kick
Kick allows roughly 8,000 Kbps, but Silksong does not need it. 5,000-6,000 Kbps at 1080p 60fps is already transparent quality.
Encoder Settings
NVENC (NVIDIA GPU): recommended
Silksong barely touches a modern GPU, so the encoder has all the headroom it wants:
- Rate Control: CBR
- Bitrate: 4,500-5,000 Kbps (Twitch), 6,000-8,000 (YouTube)
- Preset: P5 (Slow), or P6 since the GPU is nearly idle
- Profile: High
- Look-ahead: Off
- Psycho Visual Tuning: On (protects the line art)
- B-frames: 2
x264 (CPU) fallback
This is one game where x264 is a legitimately good option, even on modest hardware, because the game itself uses so little CPU:
- Preset: Slow on a six-core or better, Medium on older quad-cores
- Bitrate: same as NVENC
- Profile: High
Streamers on GTX-era cards or laptops can run x264 Medium here without dropped frames, which is rarely true for 3D titles. See NVENC vs x264 for streaming for when each encoder makes sense.
In-Game Settings That Help Your Stream
Silksong has a lean settings menu, but a few choices matter:
- Frame rate cap: 60fps minimum, matched to your OBS output. A mismatched cap (game at 144, OBS at 60) is fine; game at 30 is not.
- VSync: On if you see screen tearing. Torn frames waste bitrate on artifacts and look terrible in 2D.
- Resolution: native fullscreen. Run the game at your monitor's native resolution and let OBS downscale with Lanczos if needed; scaling 2D art twice softens the lines.
- Camera shake: reduce it if the option is available in your build. Shake is full-frame motion with no informational value.
- Keep overlays off the action. Silksong uses the full frame for platforming; a webcam box covering a bottom corner will eventually hide a spike pit.
Internet Requirements
This is where Silksong shines for streamers on slower connections. At 4,500 Kbps you only need about 7-8 Mbps upload with comfortable headroom, and even a 6 Mbps line can carry a clean 720p 60fps stream at 3,500 Kbps. That makes Silksong one of the best games to stream on DSL, hotel Wi-Fi, or congested cable. Check your real numbers with our streaming bitrate calculator and confirm your line has the margin with the bandwidth calculator; leave roughly 30 percent of your upload free for overhead.
Bottom Line
Silksong flips the usual streaming problem. Bitrate is cheap because 2D hand-drawn art and predictable parallax compress incredibly well, so 4,000-5,000 Kbps looks perfect where a 3D game would fall apart. Spend your effort on the things that actually show: a locked 60fps for the fast combat, Lanczos downscaling for the crisp line art, and a stable connection. It is the rare major release that low-end PCs and slow internet can stream beautifully.