1. Adding the game to OBS

You may wonder: "Do I really need to read this page?"

The answer is: YES, because it's most likely that you'll find something you didn't know about. Streaming a game like rivals has it's own advantages and again and again I see even professional streams not using them.

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Now, I want to talk about something super important. The game source. Yeah, the most important thing is the first thing you should setup. But this will depend on 2 cases:

Streaming the game from the stream PC

This is mostly common when doing online streams. In this case we just use a literal game source. This step is easy, right? WRONG!! You forgot to set POINT SCALLING.

Wait, what’s that? You've never heard that before? Well, this is basically what rivals does when scaling the screen. By doing this, your game won’t look blurry if you are streaming a tiny window, and I'll assume you are not running fullscreen when streaming an online tournament. You are going to see the game’s clear pixels in full HD glory no matter how much you scale it.

It also will help if you set the game source to Fit to screen (Ctrl+F with the source selected or right click source -> Transform -> Fit to screen). This will make it so it always shows the source the same way in case the game switches from windowed/fullscreen modes.

Streaming the game from a different PC / from a console

On a local event, the stream setup won't be where the players play, so we need to grab the game with something. And you may think: "Yeah, I'll just grab my capture card-" WAIT, if your setup is on a PC, we can use the benefits of PC here! So let's consider our options:

Capture the game with a Capture card

This is the default option for like 99% of tournaments, since you are going to use capture cards for other console games anyways.

• Advantages
  • You probably already have one.
  • You just need to plug the monitor, no messing with the PC/console itself.
  • Everyone has experience with capture cards so it's easy to troubleshoot.
• Disadvantages
  • On a properly configured game PC, the stream will see screen fractures due to having vsync disabled.
  • Audio could be bad quality depending on the capture card
  • Colors may be more or less saturated than they should.
  • Captures the whole monitor, so in PC, if the game for any reason alt-tabs or crashes, it will look horrible on stream.
  • Depending on the capture card, complicated setup to add the feed to OBS.
  • Expensive option if you don't already have a capture card.

Capture the game with NDI

Wait, whats that? This is a technology that allows to send the game from one computer from another via local network.

• Advantages
  • Audio and video quality are 100% what they should be.
  • No screen tearing, and possibly better frame pacing than a capture card.
  • Totally free, provided you meet the setup conditions.
  • Since we'll be seeing a obs source, if the game crashes or alt-tabs, the stream will just get a screen freeze or a black screen.
  • Can easily get the feed from multiple PCs at once.
• Disadvantages
  • You need to meet the conditions: Both computers need to have an ethernet cable plugged, on the same network, at 1Gbps (which should be the default but hey some infrastructures are still old).
  • Meeting the conditions will heavily depend on the venue.
  • OBS needs to be running on the game pc, if it's a really bad one, it may experience slowdowns.
  • New technology, people don't have as much experience with it, issues may happen.

NDI setup is actually pretty easy so I'll leave that research to you, just make sure you apply what we discussed on the Streaming the game from the stream PC section when setting up the game pc.