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Published: March 5, 2019 | Source: Nvidia | Author: Mark Campbell

OBS now Boasts a Hefty NVENC Performance Boost and Higher Quality Streams on RTX GPUs

OBS now Boasts a Hefty NVENC Performance Boost and Higher Quality Outputs on RTX GPUs

OBS now Boasts a Hefty NVENC Performance Boost and Higher Quality on RTX GPUs

OBS Studio version 23 is now available, and with it comes a major boost to the performance of Nvidia’s NVENC encoder, delivering a 66% performance boost over older versions of the software. With this version of OBS, only 4% of a game’s performance is lost through the encoding and broadcasting process, giving streamers higher framerates than before. 

While some high-end streamers have invested in high-end secondary PCs to maximise their streaming quality, normal consumers neither have the budget or the need to make such an investment, preferring to place higher-end components into their primary gaming system. The downside of this is clear; as your gaming PC will need to both play games and stream the video online without major dips to in-game performance or video quality. This is what makes GPU-based encoding methods popular, such as Nvidia’s NVENC hardware encoder.

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. The graph below showcases the performance impact of a 1080p stream on a system with Intel i7-8700K.  
 

Nvidia works with OBS to deliver 66% imporvement to NVENC Streaming  

Thanks to Nvidia’s new Turing graphics architecture, the company has greatly improved the hardware encoder that’s included within Turing, making video encodes around 15% more efficient. This means that NVENC can now offer the same level of image quality as before while boasting 15% lower bitrates, or pack more detail into every frame at higher bitrates. At a bitrate of 8,000, Nvidia’s Turing Encoder can match the quality of OBS’ x264 Medium settings. 

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.   

Nvidia works with OBS to deliver 66% imporvement to NVENC Streaming

 
For those who are new to Streaming, Nvidia has released the following video which is designed to help Geforce users get started using their NVENC encoder. This makes this video applicable to Nvidia graphics cards specifically, though some of the tips and tricks will apply to graphics hardware from competing brands. 

StreamLabs plans to implement Nvidia’s performance optimisations into their streaming client in the near future. 

You can join the discussion on OBS being optimised for Nvidia’s NVENC Encoder on the OC3D Forums. 

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