Question / Help Hoping a new video card will improve performance; recommendations?

[Mango]

I found some old threads on this topic but was hoping to see if I could get some more recent recommendations.

We broadcast 1080p video (via USB3HDCAPM) and PowerPoint on a computer with Windows 10 and an i7-4790 CPU. Currently we use x264 preset=superfast which kinda works as long as there's no fast motion and I don't try to play any video. During fast motion a lot of frames get dropped, and if I play video it plays at ~1fps. If a video is required, I have to stop the stream, play the video, then restart the stream. I have tried to use Quicksync, but when I do ANYTHING else on the computer (even opening Calculator) I get an "encoder overload" message and I drop a lot of frames.

I'm hoping a video card upgrade would improve things but don't really know what to look for. Ideally we'd like to stick with 1080p at ~30 fps even if there is fast motion, and be able to play video as part of our presentation. I have a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot available.

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

 

[carlmmii]

Please post a log with your issue! Here's how...

 

[BluePeer]

but when I do ANYTHING else on the computer (even opening Calculator) I get an "encoder overload"

a log is still useful to see the system state
but if the system already overloaded with open calculator you can insert what you wan't you will still have the biggest bottleneck the base system itself

This is the Point where you need to Look what you need today and in the next 4Years
you need record you need stream where the way will go
the base system is not "bad" but hard outdated for the future

 

[Mango]

Since this forum was as utterly useless as ever, I thought it would be good to post the answer to my own question in case anyone else has the same idea.

The answer: adding a video card produced a dramatic, night-and-day improvement in the performance of my system.

General consensus from Googling seemed to be that the sixth generating (Turing) of NVENC is the best-performing (as one would expect from the latest generation). Quadro and Tesla were out of my employer's price range so I bought a ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1660 which had plenty of positive reviews on Amazon and was priced relatively well. Note that according to NVIDIA's website, the 1650 has a Turing GPU but Volta (fifth generation) NVENC which apparently doesn't perform very well at all. According to Wikipedia and confirmed by TechPowerUp, the GTX 1650 Super uses the same TU116 GPU as my 1660, although this did not appear in the NVIDIA matrix I linked above. The 1650 Super version has less/slower memory. I don't know how that would affect performance for OBS purposes. It did not have anywhere close to the number of reviews that the 1660 has, but now that I have something to compare it to I might get one of those next and compare it. (If you've tested this, do let me know your opinion.)

Installation of the card was pretty simple. Napkin math stated I needed a 430W power supply for the computer + this new video card. They had a cheap 300W in there so I bought a 500W to have some wiggle room. The new card required an 8-pin PCIe power connector. It only had DisplayPort and HDMI ports so I used a $2 adapter from AliExpress to connect their VGA monitor. Took one reboot to get video, a second reboot after driver installation, and then things were ready to go.

I configured OBS as per NVIDIA's guide, except I use 1920x1080 / 29.97 / 2500 kbit/sec. Right off the giddy-up I noticed CPU usage was just 4%. This is a significant improvement from the former 60+% when using the CPU for encoding. I just about drooled when I looked at the stream on YouTube. Even with the tiny amount of bandwidth we have available in the rural town my employer's site is in, it looked like a million bucks. No visible dropped frames, even fast motion looked perfectly smooth, graphics looked crisp and sharp. Playing video worked perfectly. Doing anything else on the computer didn't affect the stream. One additional nice side effect I noticed is I no longer need to adjust the audio/video sync. The audio now matches the video when set to 0.

tl;dr: If you don't have an incredibly fast CPU that does a good job of encoding your video with a reasonable x264 preset, I highly recommend purchasing a video card with the Turing NVENC feature. From now on our budget setups will be a refurbished desktop in the $400 range, a new power supply, and a NVIDIA graphics card with Turing GPU. Based on my testing it should be very possible to get excellent results with a computer that costs well under $1000. I expect that a CPU that could comfortably beat the quality of my GTX 1660 - and leave the same amount of room for other use as I enjoy now - would easily double the cost of my setup, not to mention the cost of a better camera so that you'd have a better source to encode.

 

[Narcogen]

An i7-4790 CPU should absolutely be able to do what you were asking without encountering performance issues.

In response to your question, @carlmmii focused on the support portion of your question in order to troubleshoot that issue, and asked for a logfile. None was provided.

This forum is not useless because someone chose to do what this forum does, which is provide support, rather than provide purchase recommendations primarily.

Of course a Turing chip encoder is a good purchase. But x264 encoding on that CPU should absolutely be sufficient.

 

[Mango]

An i7-4790 CPU should absolutely be able to do what you were asking without encountering performance issues.

hard outdated for the future

I might have troubleshooted further if I had not seen the "hard outdated" message. I didn't figure it was worth it. Generally the responses I receive in this forum are either "update Windows and OBS" or "your hardware is outdated". I figured since I usually get told to upgrade my hardware, I'd get some responses asking for advice about upgrading hardware. Can't win I guess...

For the record, NVIDIA claims that Turing's encoder beats x264 preset=fast. There is no possible way I could use that preset, so I am happy with my decision.

 

[Narcogen]

The 1660 is a superb card, and worth the purchase price just for the encoder. There's no reason whatsoever to be unhappy with that purchase.

Users generally get "update Windows and OBS" responses because logfiles show that they don't do this. Bugfixes do not get backported to old versions. Users don't keep around old machines and old operating systems for the purposes of duplicating bugs on old versions of the software. So the first response to a user question is always to get a logfile, and if the logfile shows that the OS, OBS distribution, or device drivers are out of date, they're going to be advised to address those first. They might be the cause, but might not be-- but at least once it's done they are eliminated as possible causes and troubleshooting can continue. Recommendations for what hardware is above or below the system requirements, or the apparent requirements for what's being asked of OBS, is specific to each and every answer.

 

[Dihelson Mendonca]

I might have troubleshooted further if I had not seen the "hard outdated" message. I didn't figure it was worth it. Generally the responses I receive in this forum are either "update Windows and OBS" or "your hardware is outdated". I figured since I usually get told to upgrade my hardware, I'd get some responses asking for advice about upgrading hardware. Can't win I guess...

For the record, NVIDIA claims that Turing's encoder beats x264 preset=fast. There is no possible way I could use that preset, so I am happy with my decision.

I think this forum is extremely helpful. I´m on several foruns on the internet, including Blackmagic Design, Avermedia, Adobe, etc, and I always, always receive some kind of good answer to my questions here prior to any other forum ( May be I´m a lucky guy ), I never received any answers like "update windows and OBS" here. Fellows like Koala and Narcogen, along with many others always provide excellent answers that have helped me a lot. So, when you said that this forum "was as utterly useless as ever", I felt personally hit, because that´s not true. The vast majority of questions have good answers here.