Question / Help b-frames best value for quality?

[sandrix]

Good afternoon! I tested the nvenc (new) encoder for a long time to get the maximum quality of the stream and recording, but still did not make a final conclusion. I would like to hear your opinion on the use of b-frames. Increasing b-frames to 1-2 improves the graininess and image quality in static scenes, but this rarely happens. There are a lot of artifacts in dynamic scenes. If I increase the value to 4, everything becomes very bad, especially if I turn off lookahead, so I always use it. Do you think it makes sense to completely abandon b-frames and use only p-frames, since they are subject to a lower compression ratio or does it still make sense to use at least 1 b-frame? Also, I tested the x264 encoder, which by default uses 3 b-frames and limited their number to 2 and 1, using the bframes = command. I also disabled b-frames with bframes = 0. So, b-frames 2 had the best result, but this did not always happen than with b-frames turned off. lookahead was turned on by default. I wonder what you think?

 

[FerretBomb]

It depends on the game being played. As you've noticed, it mostly (only) helps with fairly static and low-motion scenes.
If you're playing Hearthstone or similar, a Lookahead of 2+ can be OK and help. Most games, a maximum of 1 should be used.
I just leave it at 0; most of the games I play have a lot of motion, and lookahead actively degrades the image quality there, especially on stream.