Question / Help Minimum Dedicated NVENC GPU for 1080P 60FPS ?

[Blooky]

Hi
I've been happy do to some testing this morning in adding an old GPU (GTX 670) to my PC and use it as a dedicated GPU to encode in NVENC 1080P 60 FPS 6000kbps for offloading the CPU.
It has worked nicely : only 7% in average of cpu occupation. no frames lost, no stutter/hitching shit as before.

I am now considering to replace this second and dedicated nvidia GPU for a new one, quieter and with a passive heatsink at an affordable price.
If I only consider a NEW gpu, the minimum to support purevideo with a passive heatsink is a GT 710
(http://www.nvidia.fr/object/geforce-gt-710-fr.html#pdpContent=2)

Do you think that's enough for encoding NVENC 1080P 60 FPS 6000kbps ?

...Otherwise, should I go for a GT720, GT730, GT1030... stronger ?

Thanks for your insights !

This is my PC Hardware : http://forum.hardware.fr/configuration.php?config=hfr.inc&pseudo=Blooky

 

[Harold]

Stick with the one-card setup. Adding a second card is going to cripple overall performance in your setup.

And that's ignoring that you REQUIRE a GTX line card for nvenc (as no GT line card has the components for nvenc)

 

[H4ndy]

GT cards only have accellerated video decoding.
To use NVenc/Shadowplay you will need a GTX-class card.

I recommend to just use your 1080 for it, the performance loss is miniscule.
Beside that its video encoder has better quality per bitrate than the old ones.

 

[Blooky]

I saw a little decrease in the overall performance with that 2gpus setup that's right, but without the stutters/hitching when I was using using x264 encoder and the global performance is still strong enough for the performance level I want to reach but you made me curious =D

I didn't find out that a GTX series was required before doing the tests earlier, thanks for the tip.

I will now remove the GTX670 and test again with NVENC on the 1080 this time.

 

[Harold]

A 2-card setup in your current computer will force the primary card into pci-e x8 mode. Normally, with just a game or just the stream, that's fine, but you're trying to do both at once, and most games end up feeding 6-7 lanes worth of bandwidth to the card on their own, and OBS uses another 4, giving you a total of between 10 and 11 lanes worth of use of the video card.

It's also one of the reasons we recommend against SLI setups, as ones on 16-lane CPUs also have this problem. OBS can't split its workload between the two cards and can't capture properly from both cards simultaneously.

 

[Blooky]

Yes And I just saw that with the new plaform (Z370 + 8700K) its still the same, in a 2 gpus setup the 2 slots will work at 8x instead of 16x. (https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/ROG-STRIX-Z370-E-GAMING/)

Thanks for the tip about SLI. I was considering it, but for even less money than buying a 2nd 1080 It's best to buy a 2nd pc dedicated to streaming.

I did some testing with the 1080 only as Nvenc and it's working fine ! I am greatly surprised. I saw a fps loss but less than with the 2 cards setup I tried earlier.

I will now try another "demanding" game and see.

 

[Blooky]

I tried another games : Forza 7, Quake Champions, starwars battlefront 2... and it's working great !

I've got a 'hardware porn' question for you :

If I decide to play on my TV (UHD@60Hz, HDR ?!?) at forza 7 (instead of 1080P@144Hz with my PC screen actually), what's the most relevant perf update I should afford for ? (since I would still stream at 1080P 60fps 6kbps as I am doing now?)

* a bigger GPU : 1080Ti ? (or wait the new nvidia generation expected for next Q1)
* a new 6+ cores CPU platform (Z370/8700K) and be back to H.264 encoding...
* get a dedicated streaming PC and be back to H.264 encoding

what do you think ?