Can OBS Studio utilize 2 NVENC engines?

[Der Fleischmann]

Hey guys!

First off I want to thank you for developing such a good software for free use! It's very powerful and I use it in all of my streams and offline recordings aswell. Thank you for that!

So lets get to the meat and bones of my thread: Have you guys implemented a way to let OBS Studio utilize 2 NVENC engines at the same time? Or is this handled automatically by the NVIDIA API anyways? I just bought an 1080 ti before Christmas and I've red, that it got 2 engines on the board, so I was asking myself that.

Furthermore I was asking myself, if it would result in some kind of quality improvement using both engines, while streaming at low bitrates (6MBit 900p on Twitch). I know that CPU-encoding is the way to go in order to achieve the best quality at lower bitrates, but I am currently running a one PC solution, which would not be able to handle the high loads and the setup will not change in the near future.

Thx in advance and greetings from germany! ;-)

 

[Fenrir]

The desired result you want is already possible. You can stream at a restricted bitrate, but record full quality locally at the same time.

Just use the recording quality presets under Settings > Output when in Simple output mode. In the recording section, change the Recording Quality to Indistinguishable Quality, and then select NVENC as your encoder.

 

[Der Fleischmann]

Thx for the answer, Fenrir!

But my thread isn't about the recording quality, but more about the 2 NVENC engines working together to get a better stream qualiy over all at lower bitrates. I am not that familiar with the capabilities of NVENC and how it would scale with 2 engines instead of the usual 1, or if OBS is able to utilize multible engines properly at all.

I use NVENC to encode my stream to Twitch and then use the Twitch to Youtube export anyways. For local recordings I use NVENC with a CQP value of 21, which is more than enough, I guess... :-)

Thx in advance!

 

[Osiris]

There is no such feature in NVENC.

 

[Der Fleischmann]

Hi Osiris! Oh, so the second engine doesn't fulfill any purpose at all? Or is it just to handle higher resolution recordings better?

 

[Osiris]

You can start 2 encoding sessions simultaneously, but that's about it.

 

[Der Fleischmann]

Damn, that's a pity. Stacking the performance of the two chips would be pretty nice. On the other hand hardware encoding at lower bitrates shouldn't look that great, but I thought NVIDIA is using some special trick. So, I guess I have to get a dedicated streaming PC instead. Thx for your time and answers!

 

[Osiris]

There is only 1 chip.