If you wish you can support the project by donating to Open Collective or Patreon (learn more here https://obsproject.com/contribute#:~:text=Support ). Your contributions help support the developers and fund equipment purchases for easier testing and development. They also go towards software licenses and other project expenses such as website and server hosting.
The program can be relatively light or heavy on your computer processor and graphic card depending on the use you make of it, with resolution and scene complexity playing a major role.
You can find the system requirements for running OBS Studio directly on the OBSproject website.
From the OBS project website:
“Encoding video is a very CPU-intensive operation, and OBS is no exception. OBS uses the best open source video encoding library available, x264, to encode video. However, some people might experience high CPU utilization, and other programs running on your computer might experience degraded performance while OBS is active if your settings are too high for your computer's hardware. In some cases, OBS will say "Encoding overloaded!" on its status bar, meaning that your computer can't encode your video fast enough to maintain the settings you have it set to, which will cause video to freeze after a few seconds, or periodic stuttering.”
As best practice you should close all applications running on your computer that you don’t need, including those running in the background. For example, if they are not involved in your OBS project, you should close Microsoft Teams, Outlook, any unnecessary browser window etc.
If you are still experiencing performance issues, you can refer to this guide to find a solution.
