Concise:

What does having 3 encoder chips in one Graphic Card enable me to do?

Background:

I currently have an RTX 3060. I stream to YouTube while recording. My recorded stream uses a much higher bit rate than the live stream. On one occasion I got a Skype call during a stream I noticed an increase in the Task Manager under GPU Video Encode. This suggest to me that my encoding chip was encoding three video streams at the same time.

I have read that I can get up to 5 with an updated driver and most recently 8 simultaneous streams.

I have read that the new RTX 5090 has 3 encoder chips. What does that enable? Do I need to wait for OBS to support this new feature?

I like the NVIDIA hardware encoder for its speed, personally I don't see any absolute difference at first glance, but I've had a number of discussions with some people on Discord about using it or not and they've said it's rubbish and that "it's a dedicated streaming codec". As I said, I love NVENC for its speed, I often interpolate videos with AIs in their TensorRT implementations, I have a RTX 4090 so those interpolations go at almost 200fps in 1080p resolution thanks to it. NVENC is really worth it when I have to interpolate whole episodes of a series, because it takes only 5 minutes and I have some doubts about whether it's worth using it and sacrificing the "supposed loss of quality" it has compared to the CPU versions, in exchange for super speed when processing the video with AI.

I have a laptop with a rtx 3060 (laptop ver) GPU. I’ve been having a time getting some things to work on my 11600 igpu (largely Unmanic and tdarr hevc encoding). I was thinking I’d go buy a base model max mini and setup handbrake to crunch through things but I don’t know how I’d make it go through the directories and skip the files that were already x265. I currently have Unmanic already going through every file and converting everything to AC3 and stripping the rest.

Then it hit me I have this laptop 32GB memory and a rtx 3060 in it. I only used it for gaming on the road (which is why I use Plex) and not using it much right now with how busy I’ve been. I’ve never encoded using nvenc. How’s the quality of the latest version? What kind of file size compression are you seeing? My TV series and movie collection are all 1080p to make streaming easier. From 12+ ft away I can never tell the difference between that and 4k anyway. Was thinking I could just plug this laptop into my 10gbe network switch and let it encode 24/7.

It's 2024 and people are still recommending Nvenc on high end PC?? I can never get the notion why people are recommending Nvenc on a single PC set up with a beefy CPU like a Ryzen 9 5900x or 7900x. These are 12C 12T processors that have more than headroom to encode x264 fast or medium, depending on the game you're playing with.

I've tested both, and I found that x264 at fast gives way better quality at the same bitrate (6000kbps), with no performance loss/encoding overload. Also noticed that facecam and overlays look way crisper on x264. It's 2024 guys, not 2014, you can definitely stream/encode x264 on a single PC if you have a Ryzen 9. Nvenc is overrated.

I have an rtx 4060 ti, and I can encode with nvenc av1 pretty quickly, even with great preset and quality settings. But I've heard that it ends up with a lot lower compression quality than CPU based aglorithms for av1.

I just want to try my new GPU for AV1 encoding. I know that hardware encoding is far away in terms of efficiency than software encoding. But I also know that even the hardware has different profiles and presets.

Is there some overview about the options and recommendations on what to use for non-realtime encoding?

Also I assume something like fim-grain-synthesis isn't directly possible with ffmpeg in one encode session, right?

Been seeing conflicting answers all around, so I thought I'd try here. Just interested in the difference between the two and if there is one that's better for certain tasks (like recording, streaming, etc.)

If it helps, I have an NVIDIA 3070ti graphics card and a 5800x CPU.

Thanks!

I've always streamed as a small side hobby and whilst my old (8 year old) pc could handle capture card footage, PC gaming/streaming in one system was largely impossible for anything slightly intensive. I was running a 770 so it was already strained on most newer titles.

Enter the 3080, as a test I booted up Yakuza Like A Dragon and set everything to max, using Nvidia's recommended NVENC for OBS fully expecting an overloaded encoder and dropped frames. Neither happened, it kept running with the very rare hitch. Nvidia consider me super impressed. I remember when the most reasonable answer for streaming was a dual pc setup, but my new 3080 hard disagrees with it. Cheers Nvidia for allowing me to single system stream again!

I'm using GTX 1070TI. And using nvenc to record my games. It's very useful when recording with 50Mbps. However, if I lower bitrate, video quality become awful. unlike software encoding. And it makes hard to broadcast my games. But I heard that NEW NVENC is not such bad thing. Is NEW NVENC recommendable thing for broadcasting or recording? If someone try streaming their games, which encoder would you recommend?

Not sure which NVENC to use for encoding, see photo

https://imgur.com/a/EeMTrB7

Everywhere online I see that NVenc encoding is a very fast way to get larger files that look worse than their software encoded brothers.

But in my testing, I found that the NVenc encode preserved much more detail than the rest of my 13 total tests.

Screenshots taken with "ffmpeg -ss" command:
https://imgur.com/a/M5RIdOG

Comparing images "0", "1", and "6" directly tells an interesting story.

"0" is the uncompressed video (26GB)
"1" is the NVenc encoded video (6.50GB)
"6" is a video compressed using x265 10-bit at RF 20 on Slow (6.59GB)

The NVenc encoded video preserved much more of the original grain in the background, while maintaining a smaller video track size than "6".

QUESTION:
Can anyone explain this? Did I do something wrong, or is the community consensus just misinformation?

Hi everyone,
I'm building a streaming setup for 1440p60 using a capture card (AverMedia G553 Pro) and I'm debating between using an NVIDIA GPU with NVENC encoder or an AMD GPU with AMF encoder.

My questions are:

• Which encoder provides better image quality for streaming?

• Has anyone had experience with AV1 encoding on both GPUs?

• How stable is AMF in OBS compared to NVENC?

• Is it worth paying a bit more for NVIDIA just because of the encoder?

My current setup: Ryzen 5 5600G, 16GB RAM, AverMedia capture card, and I'm planning to buy either an RTX 4060 or an RX 7600.

Thanks in advance for any help, tips, and recommendations!

Upgraded from a RTX 4070 to a 5070 Ti. I did not want to upgrade and I was perfectly happy with the performance of my 4070 but because of the dual encoder support recently I had no choice, and I can say it is amazing, now 4:4:4 is totally usable, before I was seeing host processing latency around 7.5 to 8 MS. Now it is 3 MS with all the bells and whistles enabled and it is lower than before and feels so much better than before.

RTX 4070 with HDR 10 Bit and 4:4:4 disabled 3.5-4.5 MS and that is how I used it 4:4:4 was unusable.

RTX 4070 with HDR 10 Bit and 4:4:4 enabled 7.5-8 MS unusable.

EDIT: apparently there is a lot of confusion about what GPU supports what. Here is a link below that explains all and which gpu have more than 1 encoders. If yours has more than 1 then you can have reduced host processing latency by enabling SFE. If yours don’t then nothing will happen.

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-support-matrix

Edit: Just to clarify, my goal is to capture everything at high quality for editing in DaVinci Resolve and later compress with Shutter Encoder.

I’ve been reading about NVENC codecs on RTX 50 cards (I have an RTX 5080), but there seems to be conflicting or outdated info. From what I understand, at the same bitrate, AV1 usually looks better than HEVC and HEVC looks better than H.264. Is that correct?

I also asked ChatGPT and here's what I gathered:

"At extremely high bitrates (low compression):

• All three get closer to the original (“visually lossless”).

• AV1 still isn’t worse — it just loses its efficiency advantage because you’re throwing tons of bits at the problem.

• None will surpass AV1 in quality per byte.

In other words:

• At normal bitrates (like 10–50 Mbps): AV1 > HEVC > H.264

• At very high bitrates (150+ Mbps for 1080p): All three look virtually identical, but AV1 won’t look worse.

• Each codec has a “ceiling” where more bitrate doesn’t give visible improvement.

• AV1’s ceiling is higher than HEVC’s, which is higher than H.264’s.

• At extremely high bitrates, all three will look visually lossless (basically identical to the source). But at those bitrates, file sizes explode and the efficiency advantage of AV1 is irrelevant.

Hardware-Encoder Quality (NVENC Generations)

The RTX 50 NVENC has Nvidia’s newest encoder block:

• AV1 on RTX 50 is ~40% more efficient than AV1 on RTX 40 at the same bitrate.

• HEVC & H.264 also got small quality improvements over previous gens.

So on RTX 50:

• AV1 = best NVENC quality Nvidia has ever shipped.

• HEVC = next best.

• H.264 = still last."

I’d love to hear your real world experience with these codecs.

Hello,

I was wondering if I should use x64 or Nvenc New for encoding. My PC set up is a Ryzen 9 3900X paired with a RTX 3070. I want to get into streaming and would like to use only a single pc.

Thank you in advance

It's hard to find a lot of data online so I am posting my comparison

MY PC SETUP

CPU Encoding using 14900F with limit to around 100 W for power effience

NVENC using 4080super when I observing its around 40 -60 w

Both are software detect reading, I assume the Actual Power usage will be 20% more

Encoding Methods:

1. NVIDIA NVENC (GPU-based encoding)

• Preset: Slowest mode

• Bitrate: 2000 kbps

• Output file size: 690 MB

• Encoding speed: 301 FPS

1. SVT-AV1 (CPU-based encoding)

• Preset: 6

• Settings: 23RF

• Output file size: 645 MB

• Encoding speed: 27 FPS

Quality Metrics:

1. NVIDIA NVENC

• PSNR: 28.6951

• SSIM: 0.9811

• VMAF: 94.0919

1. SVT-AV1 (CPU)

• PSNR: 28.6974

• SSIM: 0.9819

• VMAF: 94.5681

Time Difference: The encoding speed difference between NVIDIA NVENC and SVT-AV1 is substantial. NVIDIA NVENC achieves an encoding speed of 301 FPS, while SVT-AV1 reaches 27 FPS on the Intel Core i9-14900F processor. This means that NVIDIA NVENC is approximately 11 times faster than SVT-AV1 in terms of encoding speed.

To put this into perspective, if we assume a 60-minute video at 30 FPS, the encoding time would be:

• NVIDIA NVENC: 60 minutes × (30 FPS ÷ 301 FPS) ≈ 6 minutes

• SVT-AV1 (CPU): 60 minutes × (30 FPS ÷ 27 FPS) ≈ 67 minutes

Please note that these are rough estimates, and actual encoding times may vary based on factors such as video complexity, specific encoding settings, and hardware capabilities.

Size Difference: The output file size difference between the two encoding methods is relatively small. NVIDIA NVENC produces a file size of 690 MB, while SVT-AV1 results in a file size of 645 MB. SVT-AV1 achieves a file size reduction of approximately 6.5% compared to NVIDIA NVENC.

Performance: In terms of encoding performance, NVIDIA NVENC demonstrates a significant advantage in encoding speed. With a speed of 301 FPS, it can encode videos much faster than SVT-AV1 on the CPU, which reaches 27 FPS. This performance difference is particularly notable when dealing with large volumes of video content or when fast turnaround times are required.

However, it's important to consider that the encoding speed measurements were taken while running two instances of HandBrake simultaneously, which may impact the performance. Running multiple encoding tasks concurrently can lead to resource contention and reduced performance compared to running a single encoding task.

Quality Comparison: Both encoding methods deliver high-quality results, with SVT-AV1 having a slight edge in terms of objective quality metrics. SVT-AV1 achieves slightly higher scores in PSNR (28.6974 vs. 28.6951), SSIM (0.9819 vs. 0.9811), and VMAF (94.5681 vs. 94.0919) compared to NVIDIA NVENC. However, the differences in quality metrics are relatively small, and both methods provide visually appealing output.

Conclusion: In summary, NVIDIA NVENC (GPU-based) encoding offers significantly faster encoding speeds compared to SVT-AV1 (CPU-based) encoding. NVIDIA NVENC is approximately 11 times faster than SVT-AV1 on the Intel Core i9-14900F processor. However, SVT-AV1 achieves slightly better compression efficiency, resulting in a smaller