Question / Help Dedicated GPU for Streaming

[acidrs]

Hello,
I have added a second GPU to my gaming PC (Not SLI or NVLNK) to be used solely as a dedicated streaming encoding device. I have managed to get this to work setting the GPU number from 0 to 1 in the output settings.
What i have noticed is that the dedicated GPU only ever hits about 14% usage when streaming. Does anyone have any experience with this to let me know if this is normal? At only 14% usage i would assume that there could be some settings i could play with to boost quality, which in turn would increase the GPU usage.
For the Hardware, i use an RTX 2080 to game on and a GTX 980 Ti is being used as the dedicated Encoding GPU using NVENC at 1080@60fps
I am using the latest OBS for windows 22.0.2 i believe.

Thanks

 

[DEDRICK]

You have achieved nothing by doing this,well you have, you've reduced your PCI Express bandwidth by 50%

In fact, with the NVENC build coming up you will even be reducing the quality of your stream by not using your RTX card as the encoder

 

[koala]

In addition to @DEDRICK: Even with the current OBS, not using NVENC on the RTX is reducing quality and speed. Nvenc on the RTX is as good as x264 medium preset, while nvenc on the gtx 980 is as good as x264 veryfast preset. That's a visual difference.
In addition to this, using nvenc on a GPU doesn't take up GPU resources, because nvenc is a dedicated asic circuit that doesn't require any computing powers of the computing cores of a GPU.

Remove the gtx 980 Ti, you will improve both your quality (better nvenc on rtx 2080) and your speed (x16 pci-express bus speed instead of x8).

 

[acidrs]

Thanks for the information.

I had noticed before adding the second card that i was getting alot of dropped frames and also drops in obs fps. Dropping the output resolution to a 720px60fps stream did help.

After adding the card i noticed no obs fps drops or dropped frames and was able to up the output resolution to 1080x60fps.

Now i do believe that the drops i am getting are from badly optimized games as i have found a couple of posts regarding games like Battlefield V and CODBO4 having issues

Battlefield V Streaming issues
CODBO4 Streaming issues

I guess from what is being advised, it may just be better to take out the 980Ti and stop trying to stream Battlefield and COD until possibly the newer OBS is released.

On a side note is there any advantage to a dedicated streaming PC? As from the information gathered it appears as though the RTX cards can do it all without a hit on performance using the Updated NVENC Obs.