Many established streamers broadcast from a two-computer setup. The reason is that encoding video and rendering a game compete for the same resources on a single machine.
Encoding is real work, not a background task
Turning rendered frames into a compressed stream requires continuous computation, and quality settings that produce a clean picture demand substantially more of it.
On a single machine that work happens while the game is also demanding everything the system has, so both tasks degrade at the moment the scene gets busy.
The result is the familiar pattern where a stream looks worst precisely during the action viewers came to watch.
Dedicated encoders reduce but do not remove the conflict
Modern graphics cards include hardware encoders that offload most of the work, which is why single-machine streaming became viable for most people.
Those encoders still share memory bandwidth and driver time with the game, and capturing frames for the stream has a cost of its own.
At modest settings the impact is small. At high resolutions and bitrates with additional overlays and processing, it becomes measurable in frame consistency.
Separation makes each machine simple
A two-machine setup sends video from the gaming computer to a capture card in a second machine, which handles encoding, scenes, alerts and chat.
The gaming machine then does one thing, and its frame rate is unaffected by whatever the broadcast is doing, including scene transitions and browser sources.
The encoding machine can also crash, be reconfigured or run heavy processing without touching the game, which matters during a long live session.
The costs are more than hardware
A second computer, a capture card and the cabling between them represent real expense, and the setup introduces its own failure points.
Audio routing becomes considerably more complicated, since game audio, voice chat, music and microphone all have to arrive at the right machine on the right channels.
Troubleshooting mid-broadcast is harder too, because a problem can originate on either machine or in the link between them.
Whether it is worth it depends on the ceiling
For a streamer whose platform caps bitrate at a modest level, the quality difference between hardware encoding on one machine and a dedicated setup is small.
The two-machine approach pays off where higher bitrates are available, where the game is demanding, or where the broadcast layout is complex enough to consume real resources.
That is why the setup is common among full-time broadcasters and rarely sensible for someone streaming a few evenings a week.