Question / Help Issues streaming FFXIV: A Realm Reborn with NvENC

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bezerker

New Member
**** Please note this was prior to 335.70. I've updated OBS/the nvidia card drivers and will attempt again later tonight.

I use NVENC to stream to a second machine on my network at high bitrate which is dedicated to then reencoding at a streamable bitrate with medium x264 preset, and streams it out to the internet. (Twitch/hitbox). Generally, I have no issues at all.

I stream 720p/60fps the majority of the time (downsize in OBS and push with NVENC llhq to my stream machine).

I started playing FFXIV and I noticed that my gameplay was "stuttering". Didn't do anything about it until I noticed my stream was also stuttering. Sure enough. NVENC is complaining it's taking too long to encode.

Ok. I'll switch to hq or bluray as they aren't as heavy compression and I don't really need the heavy compression anyway. No preset change helped.

This is the first time I've experienced issues like this, so not sure where to troubleshoot.

Here is my log from that evening where I tried other presets etc:

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/fd4fb7d95cece1e100f0

I've heard the encoder is separate from the display gpu, so the fact that FFXIV Is a graphically intensive game shouldn't have anything to do with this right?

Thanks in advance,
Bez
 
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BtbN

Member
The encoder is seperate from the GPU and does not affect the GPU performance. The only impact is has is the bandwidth it takes from PCIe bus. So if that game is very heavy on that aspect, nvenc is going to hurt its performance.
 
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bezerker

New Member
Interesting.

It's a 16x bus.. I can't imagine that it would be limited. I'm not running SLI or anything that should reduce that. Hrm.

Really strange. I can't wait till tonight to try with the newest obs/drivers, but I'm not expecting much.
 
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BtbN

Member
Keep in mind that it downloads and uploads uncompressed video frames for that, that's a surprisingly high bandwidth if you do the math on it.
 
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bezerker

New Member
That's fair enough. Hrm. I'll have to debug further. Looks like my ghetto capture cardless 2 pc stream setup may have hit a brick wall. :)
 
Boildown

Boildown

Active Member
Just change presets to something that doesn't attempt to compress so much. I would say the High Performance preset is the best bet, I'm not sure why people suggested Low Latency, as Low Latency encoding makes a bunch of compromises that aren't relevant for us (unless the preset is poorly named).

Your bitrate of 30,000 is probably fine. Personally I use 20,000 at 1080p60 and I think the image quality is fine. But I question your buffer selection of 1000. I turn the buffer restriction off by setting it to 0, but I've also used 20000 buffer with 20000 bitrate. I would change that buffer to something close to your bitrate, or disable using a fixed buffer entirely. I believe the Two PC Configuration Without Capture Card guide says to use a buffer of 7000, so I'd set it to that, for starters.
 
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bezerker

New Member
I'll give high performance a shot. I would suspect if it's an actual encoding issue that it would still be near high enough quality for my remote end to pick up.

I had used a 7k buffer (anything higher and nginx discos), but realized that on my local lan I likely need no buffer at all. I was not aware that you could set it to 0. :) Will give that a shot when I get home.

Thanks.
 
Boildown

Boildown

Active Member
bezerker said:
I'll give high performance a shot. I would suspect if it's an actual encoding issue that it would still be near high enough quality for my remote end to pick up.

I had used a 7k buffer (anything higher and nginx discos), but realized that on my local lan I likely need no buffer at all. I was not aware that you could set it to 0. :) Will give that a shot when I get home.

Thanks.
Click to expand...
I think the 7000 buffer recommendation was for nginx, not for local lan considerations. nginx doesn't seem to like larger buffers.
 
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