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.

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?

If I understand correctly, the most important one is NVENC because I'll be encoding into a new format for the purposes of transcoding. Is this right? If so, would NVDEC really come into play at all?

I'm eyeing cards and specifically with HEVC support, it seems more robust for encoding rather than decoding. Just want to make the right purchase decision.

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