Challenge 3: A Game Slowing Down Once Streaming Starts — Solution Walkthrough

A likely cause:

Per this chapter's own material, x264 (software encoding) runs on the
CPU, directly competing for processing resources with anything else
demanding running at the same time — including the game itself. If
this streamer's encoder is set to x264, the encoding process is likely
consuming CPU resources the game also needs, causing the game's own
performance to drop once streaming begins.

Why this specifically points to the encoder choice:

The game running fine before streaming started, but slowing down once
it did, is a strong sign that streaming itself introduced a new source
of CPU load — exactly what x264 software encoding does, since it uses
the same CPU the game is also relying on for its own performance.

A possible fix:

Per this chapter's own material, switching to a hardware encoder —
NVENC (Nvidia), AMF (AMD), or QuickSync (Intel), whichever matches the
streamer's own GPU — would offload the encoding work onto a dedicated
hardware chip built into the GPU, freeing up the CPU for the game
itself rather than competing with it for the same resource.

Why this is a genuine, practical fix rather than just a setting to try
at random:

This chapter specifically frames hardware encoding as "genuinely
important for anyone also running a game or other demanding software
at the same time as recording/streaming" — precisely the situation
described here.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
------------------------------
This exercise applies this chapter's own x264-vs-hardware-encoder
material to a realistic performance complaint, correctly identifying
CPU contention as the likely cause and hardware encoding as the
targeted fix.