Question / Help 5700 XT + NVENC GPU ? Performance when using PCIE 4.0

[Max1338]

Hey Guys,

I am currently in a weird situation since I just bought a 5700 XT and now wanted to start to stream. As I noticed afterwards the AMF quality is very miserable for streaming in 6k bitrate. After that, I saw a video where people talked about dual GPU setups and I thought nice I could just get a cheap nvenc GPU and then use the nvenc on it. But then I saw the video from EposVox where he showed that dual GPU setups are running slower than single GPU ones.
Since the 5700 XT and my mainboard support PCIE 4.0 and are currently running on it I was wondering if the performance hit in his video was due to PCIE 3.0 bandwidth limits and could be possible negligible with PCIE 4.0 or if this performance loss is caused by something else.

Regards Max

 

[vapeahoy]

Actually dual gpu works great, just not out of the box. It's contigent on you know what you're doing tho and so im not going to suggest that as a solution. However it's use case has long since been outdated, except for a few rare instances of capturing old games perhaps.

The problem you portray here is that your observation of the stream in 6k bitrate using amd encoder is "miserable".
You don't say what resolution, what you try to stream, fps settings, and so on. Nor do you even mention your encoder settings or a log file.
As if you have the best possible settings for streaming in 6k using the amd encoder and it isn't good enough.

Best of luck.

 

[Max1338]

@vapeahoy Thanks for the answer. I didn't post my settings because I am sure that getting a comparable quality to nvenc with amf isn't gonna happen soon. Based on this video https://youtu.be/ccoOGfX9qxg?t=583

My settings for 1920x1080 @ 60 fps:

This is the OBS Log: https://obsproject.com/logs/jAD8vDkVtr77APlt

Back to the dual GPU video. Are there any settings I need to take? Since as I already mentioned EposVox tested this and had a big performance hit on the game https://youtu.be/R0zEFF6q2Ng?t=684 as you can see in the video.

 

[vapeahoy]

I believe i was quite clear, the use case is outdated. The purpose of it is to capture basically old games with a gpu engine that is on par with the age of the game. As to recreate the experience and maximum compability, often giving better graphics since some extensions are now often overlooked. In other words that epos guy doesnt understand where it's coming from. It's the same thing with OpenAL and older audio cards that brought multi channel/surround support as to help the cpu of the systems etc. Ie 20 years ago. For instance Quake III Arena had such support, which made the 3d audio years ahead of it's time actually. And now i regret this post, as they no longer make great stuff as this anymore. damn...
Winz, which is a professional player used dual gpu for obs some years ago iirc, but most have just switched to a single nvenc solution, due to simplicity.

1080P/6mbit is out of the question regardless for nvidia or amd gpu encoding. It's doable on cpu, but it's going to cost you a new dedicated pc.
While some will say its doable, sure, technically, but it will have problems, and thus in my view - fail.

I would rather you try and up the bitrate to 7 or 8 mbit, see if twitch allows it for you, or go down to 720p and accept it.

 

[koala]

The strength of Nvenc on OBS is based on two things. First is the quality that is on par with software encoding. On the previous Pascal chips (GTX 10x0), it's as good as the "veryfast" x264 preset, while on Turing chips (RTX 20x0/GTX 1660) it's even around "medium" x264 preset. Second is the "nvenc (new)" OBS implementation, which is made in a way the encoder encodes directly from the frame buffer of the graphics card. All other encoders download the raw data from the graphics card and feed it to an encoder, and by not requiring this transfer, nvenc helps performance tremendously.
If you add a second GPU to your machine, use one for rendering and use the other for encoding, you thwart the second part of Nvenc. Nvenc isn't able to directly encode the frame buffer of the "other" GPU. The data has to be moved from one GPU to the other. Because of this, SLI setups don't work as expected as well.

So: OBS works best with one single powerful GPU.

If you stream and decide to use a good hardware encoder for encoding, get and use a single Nvidia GPU, preferably one with the Turing chip. Remove and sell the AMD GPU. It's not the best for this scenario. Adding some cheap Nvidia GPU just for encoding isn't using the hardware in the best way. It's also a waste of money, because for the price of both you would be able to buy one powerful enough Nvidia GPU.

On the other hand, your Ryzen 7 is probably powerful enough to use x264 as encoder and still run your game properly, so you don't need to use a hardware encoder in the first place.