Question / Help “New” NVENC Encoding Question

[JBlake]

Hi. The company I work for has several computers with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000’s and 5000’s, which as I understand it, is the Turing line of NVIDIA cards.
I know Quadro cards have NVENC chips, but does the Quadro RTX 4000/5000 support the “new” NVENC encoding that’s optimized for OBS Studio? Everything I read about the most recent “new” NVENC encoding is connected to the GeForce line of cards. My company only has Quadro RTX.
Any help would be super appreciated!

 

[FerretBomb]

Yes, the NVENC (new) is just a revamped, optimized way of OBS communicating with the NVENC core on the GPU. The primary difference is that it will copy the output buffer directly to another spot in VRAM, rather than copying it out to system RAM, then back to the GPU. Doing that reduces PCIe traffic by quite a bit.

All NVENC-equipped GPUs can use NVENC (new) in OBS just fine, including Quadro cards.

 

[JBlake]

Yes, the NVENC (new) is just a revamped, optimized way of OBS communicating with the NVENC core on the GPU. The primary difference is that it will copy the output buffer directly to another spot in VRAM, rather than copying it out to system RAM, then back to the GPU. Doing that reduces PCIe traffic by quite a bit.

All NVENC-equipped GPUs can use NVENC (new) in OBS just fine, including Quadro cards.

Big thanks FerretBomb! Do you happen to know if cuda cores and/or VRAM amount affects NVENC performance?

 

[FerretBomb]

Big thanks FerretBomb! Do you happen to know if cuda cores and/or VRAM amount affects NVENC performance?

Only three NVENC options use CUDA cores, and they should only rarely if ever be used; the Max Quality preset, Psycho-Visual Tuning, and Lookahead. It's generally advised to disable all of them when streaming, as they can (and do regularly) cause performance issues. Just use the Quality preset, and make sure the other two are turned off.

VRAM isn't really going to affect NVENC itself, but it will be relevant to OBS; sources do take up VRAM after all, as do some filters (like the Render Delay filter, which uses quite a lot). Most sources will be loaded into VRAM as uncompressed data, meaning image sources can take up a lot more than some people expect. It's one reason that Slideshow sources can 'miss' frames... the slideshow source type limits itself to 250MB VRAM usage per instance, but that limit is pretty easy and quick to hit, in many cases under 5-10 images.

 

[JBlake]

Ty so much!! This is a great explainer and helps tremendously!