Bitrate vs Resolution vs Frame Rate

Resolution: The Canvas Size

Imagine you are an artist. Resolution is simply the size of the canvas you have to work with. It refers to the physical number of horizontal and vertical pixels that make up the image on your screen.

In the streaming world, "bigger" is constantly marketed as "better," but that is a dangerous half-truth. While a larger canvas theoretically allows for more detail, it also demands exponentially more data to fill. Here are the standard tiers you will encounter:

• 720p (HD): 1280 x 720 pixels. The bare minimum for "High Definition." It is fantastic for mobile phones and situations where you have low internet speed. It requires very little data to look "clean."
• 1080p (Full HD): 1920 x 1080 pixels. The gold standard. 90% of monitors and TVs handle this perfectly. It has over 2 million pixels per frame.
• 1440p (2K / QHD): 2560 x 1440 pixels. The sweet spot for PC gaming. It offers sharper text and textures than 1080p without the massive performance cost of 4K.
• 4K (UHD): 3840 x 2160 pixels. The premium tier. It contains 4x the pixels of 1080p (over 8 million pixels). To look good, it requires massive amounts of data.

Frame Rate (FPS): The Motion Smoothness

If Resolution is the space, Frame Rate (measured in Frames Per Second or FPS) is the time. It measures how many distinct images are flashed on screen every second to create the illusion of movement. This is critical for "feel" and responsiveness.

Different genres have very different Frame Rate standards:

• 24 FPS (Cinema): Movies are almost always shot at 24fps. This provides a natural motion blur that our brains associate with high-quality film. If you watch a movie at 60fps, it often suffers from the "Soap Opera Effect," looking unnaturally smooth and cheap.
• 30 FPS (TV & Standard Vlogs): The standard for television broadcast and most talking-head YouTube videos. It balances smoothness with data efficiency. If you are just sitting and talking to a camera, you rarely need more than 30fps.
• 60 FPS (Gaming & Sports): The holy grail for action. In video games or fast-paced sports, 60fps makes movement feel responsive and fluid. It helps you track fast-moving objects (like a crosshair or a football).

The Data Trap: Increasing your Frame Rate from 30 to 60 effectively doubles the amount of data your video stream needs to process. If you don't increase your bitrate to match, your 60fps stream will look pixelated and blurry because the encoder is starving for data.

Bitrate: The Digital Paint

This is the variable that marketing teams ignore, but engineers obsess over. Bitrate is the amount of data processed per second, usually measured in Kilobits per second (Kbps) or Megabits per second (Mbps). Think of it as the tube of paint you have available to cover your canvas.

Here is why your 4K stream often looks worse than a 1080p Blu-ray:

A standard 4K Netflix stream uses about 15 Mbps (Megabits per second). A standard 1080p Blu-ray disc uses about 30-40 Mbps. Even though the Blu-ray has a smaller resolution (fewer pixels), it has more than double the "paint" (data) to define those pixels. This results in perfect clarity, zero blur, and rich colors.

If you have a massive canvas (4K Resolution) but only a tiny tube of paint (Low Bitrate), the encoder has to stretch that paint thin. The result? Macroblocking (squares), banding colors, and a "smudged" look. A high-bitrate 1080p stream will always beat a low-bitrate 4K stream.

The Bitrate Budget

When setting up a stream (OBS/Streamlabs) or exporting a video, you do not have unlimited resources. You are limited by your Upload Speed. This is your "Bitrate Budget." You have to spend this budget on either Resolution or Frame Rate.

First, go to a speed test site and check your **Upload** speed (not Download). If your upload speed is 10 Mbps, you cannot stream at 10,000 Kbps, or you will disconnect. You need to leave headroom (about 20-30%) for games and system tasks. So, with 10 Mbps upload, your "safe" budget is about 7,000 Kbps.

• Scenario A: Fast Paced Gaming (Apex Legends, COD).
  You need 60fps for smoothness. High motion requires lots of data.
  Recommendation: Lower the resolution to 720p or 936p so you can afford the 60fps and keep the bitrate high enough to prevent pixelation.
• Scenario B: Just Chatting / Strategy Games (Hearthstone).
  Movement is low. You don't need 60fps.
  Recommendation: Drop to 30fps. Use the saved data budget to bump the resolution up to 1080p or 1440p for a crisper image.

The Invisible Enemy: Compression Artifacts

What actually happens when you don't have enough bitrate? The video encoder (the software compressing your video) starts to panic. It uses "Inter-frame compression" to save space.

It saves a full picture (an I-Frame) once every few seconds. In between, it only saves the changes (P-Frames and B-Frames). If you are standing still, very little changes, so the quality looks perfect.

But if you spin your camera quickly in a video game, or if confetti falls on screen, everything changes at once. The encoder tries to describe millions of changing pixels but hits your bitrate limit. It gives up and draws big, ugly squares instead of detailed pixels. These squares are called "Compression Artifacts."

Codecs: The Compressor

Raw video data is massive—uncompressed 1080p video would take up gigabytes per minute. To stream it, we compress it using a "Codec." The codec you choose changes how efficient your bitrate is.

• H.264 (AVC): The old reliable. It works on almost every device in existence, from old iPhones to smart fridges. It is fast to encode but is not very "smart," so it requires a higher bitrate to look good.
• H.265 (HEVC): The modern standard. It is roughly 50% more efficient than H.264. This means a 5,000 Kbps stream in H.265 looks as good as a 10,000 Kbps stream in H.264. The downside? It requires a stronger PC to encode and isn't supported by every browser.
• AV1: The future. It is open-source and even more efficient than H.265. YouTube and Twitch are moving toward this, but hardware support (like newer NVIDIA/AMD cards) is still catching up.

The Secret Weapon: 936p

If you hang out in pro streamer circles, you might hear about "936p" (1664 x 936 resolution). Why this weird number?

It's simple math. Twitch has a soft bitrate cap of about 6,000 to 8,000 Kbps. This isn't quite enough for fast-paced 1080p/60fps gaming (which really needs 10,000+ Kbps to look perfect). However, 720p often looks a bit too blurry on modern monitors.

936p is the "Goldilocks" resolution. It offers significantly more sharpness than 720p, but it fits comfortably within Twitch's 6,000 Kbps limit without pixelating. It is also divisible by 8, which makes it friendly for encoders (which process video in 8x8 blocks).

Platform Specifics

You can't just set your bitrate to "Infinity." Every platform has caps and quirks.

Twitch: Twitch is notorious for its strict cap. Officially, they recommend 6,000 Kbps. Unofficially, you can push it to 8,000 Kbps (audio included). If you try to stream 4K on Twitch, you will fail because 8,000 Kbps isn't enough data for 4K. Twitch also doesn't always offer "transcoding" (quality options) to new streamers, meaning if you stream at 1080p, your mobile viewers might buffer.

YouTube: YouTube is a beast. They accept massive bitrates (up to 50,000+ Kbps) and support 4K60fps streaming. However, YouTube transcodes everything, meaning even if you send them a perfect file, they re-compress it. Sometimes, a crisp 1080p stream on Twitch looks better than a compressed 1080p stream on YouTube due to this aggressive re-compression.

Recommended Settings

Here are the "Sweet Spot" settings for H.264 (NVIDIA NVENC / x264) streaming.

Un's Final Verdict

The biggest mistake new creators make is obsessing over "4K" or "1080p" without respecting the bitrate. The Triangle of Quality must be balanced.

• If your internet is slow (Upload < 10Mbps): Swallow your pride and stick to 720p/60fps or 1080p/30fps. A clean 720p stream looks infinitely better than a blocky 1080p mess. Viewers will leave if they see pixels, not if the resolution is slightly lower.
• If you record for editing: Do not use these bitrate settings! Use CQP (Constant Quantization Parameter) or VBR with very high settings (50Mbps+). Disk space is cheap; you can always compress it later, but you can't add quality back in once it's recorded.
• For Viewers: If a stream looks bad, it's rarely the resolution's fault. It's usually "bitrate starvation" caused by fast motion. Try lowering the quality setting on the player to see if a lower, more stable bitrate actually looks smoother.