Stream stuttering but CPU usage not above 90%

[OKAMISC]

i7 7700k 4.8ghz
GTX 1080TI
16GB ram

I am not new to streaming but I need help. Before I go into detail, please know I am on a single PC setup and that I plan on upgrading to an i7 8700K within the next few weeks. However...

As of right now I want the best quality I possibly can get out of my system. And it seems I cant do that with an i7 7700k unless the game isnt too greedy. It seems that I can only use NVENC encoder for streaming. I have been using:

NVENC
6000 bitrate
Default
Keyframe interval 2
profile main
GPU 0
B frames 2
level auto

These have been my settings for about 3-4 months. But When I look back on my stream I see HEAVY pixels when high movement. I usually stream or have streamed Anthem beta, The Division, The Division 2 beta, Overwatch, Destiny 2, and other FPS games. Prior to November I streamed Destiny 2 on a mix on Medium to high settings on x264 with no problems. The Settings I used at the time were:

x264
6000 bitrate
keyframe interval 2
Faster
High

And it was actually quite nice on stream. But tonight, I attempted to try "Faster" and "Very fast" preset with x264 on Apex Legends and The Division 2. Its not turning out to well, and Im not sure why. I can stream it on NVENC but with HEAVY pixels during high movement. Faster uses about 50-60% of my CPU while the games want the same amount so That doesnt work, and Very Fast works *in task manager*, the CPU usage NEVER hits 95%, but for some reason On stream I get little stutters. CPU usuage stays around 70-90%. I've tried streaming at 900p60 and 720p60.

Any help of tips would be appreciated, thanks.

 

[geofelt]

It seems to me that stuttering issues are caused by lack of cpu capability.

Be careful how you interpret task manager cpu utilizations.
Windows will spread the activity of a single thread over all available threads.
So, if you had a game that was single threaded and cpu bound, it would show up on a quad core processor as 25%
utilization across all 4 threads.
leading you to think your bottleneck was elsewhere.
It turns our that few games can usefully use more than 2-3 threads.
How can you tell how well threaded your games or apps are?
One way is to disable one thread and see how you do.

You can do this in the windows msconfig boot advanced options option.
You will need to reboot for the change to take effect. Set the number of processors to less than you have.
This will tell you how sensitive your games are to the benefits of many threads.
If you see little difference, it tells you that you will not benefit from more cores.
Likely, a better clock rate will be more important.

If you have the budget for a i7-8700K upgrade I think you would be much better off with a i7-9700K.
The single thread clock rate will be better. You will be making a trade off between 12 threads and a faster 8 thread processor.
If budget is not an issue, the i9-9900K is the best of both worlds.

Sorry, I can't help you on those game settings.