Nvidia works with OBS to deliver 66% improvement to NVENC Streaming
Nvidia works with OBS to deliver 66% improvement to NVENC Streaming
While some streamers rely on the raw CPU grunt of secondary PCs to encode their video, most of us either don’t have the budget for that kind of setup or would simply rather place that money into upgrading our mains systems. The downside of this is clear; your gaming PC will need to both play games and stream the video online without major dips to in-game performance or video quality, making GPU-based encoding methods popular, such as Nvidia’s NVENC hardware encoder.Â
Nvidia has been collaborating with OBS, the Open Broadcast Software, to improve its performance when using Nvidia’s NVENC encoder, reducing the in-game performance impact of using the encoder. Later this month, streamers using Nvidia hardware will be able to benefit from the fruits of this effort, with Nvidia promising a 66% reduction in the in-game performance impact of using the company’s hardware encoder. Â
This change will allow streamers to aim for higher framerates and/or graphical settings, while also allowing them to avoid OBS’ CPU sapping x264 encoders more easily. Â
When announcing this planned update, Nvidia also noted that their latest RTX series graphics cards featured improvements to the company’s NVENC encoder, changed that made the encoder 15% more efficient on Turing than Pascal. This allows Nvidia’s encoder to reach quality parity with OBS’ x264 Medium Encoder at a bitrate of 8,000.Â
Nvidia’s Turing architecture, in conjunction with OBS’ upcoming updates, will allow Nvidia’s hardware encoder to offer similar quality to CPU-based x264 Medium encodes while offers end users increased performance, which is great news for streamers on Nvidia hardware. Changes to Nvidia’s hardware encoder with Turing allows the new architecture to deliver increased image quality over Pascal when both are streaming at the same bitrate. Â
OBS is currently scheduled to release these NVENC performance updates at the end of this month, with Nvidia GTX 700-series (and newer graphics cards with NVENC) benefitting from the update. StreamLabs plans to implement these changes into their client after the next OBS release. Â
You can join the discussion on Nvidia’s work with OBS to reduce the performance impact of NVENC game streaming on the OC3D Forums.Â