In macbooks you can use igpu for encoding, imo works pretty well.
Not sure if OBS supports that, but I was able to use it with ffmpeg
I have a 2015 mbp and just setup obs on it a few days ago. Cpu encoding is the only option.
Re:OBS Studio 26.0
by hashtagmarkup on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @09:19PM
(#24634901)
I was in the same boat. Switched to a T495 ThinkPad with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 3700U w/ Radeon Vega 10 Gfx, and now my macs feel like toys. Unbelievable power. Would never imagine a laptop could do any of things OBS is able to deliver without breaking a sweat.
OBS supports hardware encoding ironically on Intel integrated graphics, but doesn't on discrete graphics. So a much better graphics chipset in a macbook is likely to be a hinderance for this.
Nvenc is supported, even says in the change log that they improved the messages they show if you are using old nvidia drivers.
NVENC is not supported on macOS because Apple does not expose it in their VT toolkit that OBS is required to use to access hardware encoders.
A 2000 series NVidia GPU can encode 4K/60 at less than 5% load (and that’s gpu loaf, cpu loaf is essentially zero)
The MacBook can do none of those things, it’s old school cpu encoding.