Lou Amadeus Gray
New Member
this preset shows up in OBS Classic, but not in OBS Studio.
My brother refuses to use OBS because he is convinced that Shadowplay's NVEnc looks better than OBS's. As a result, he records stupid videos where he cannot hide the steam overlay, and they look really unprofessional. So I am trying to convince him that he should just use OBS, where he has more control over everything. But he is stubborn because of the quality difference.
I didn't want to believe him about it, because shadowplay is severely limiting in every other regard, and I refuse to use it myself. But after realizing that OBS Classic had the NVDefault preset, I thought maybe that was a useable solution. I did some comparison tests between OBS Classic with NVDefault vs OBS Studio with High Quality vs Shadowplay. I determined that the NVDefault looked pretty much identical to Shadowplay, but the High Quality looked more blocky, making it seem overall lower quality.
I found many threads about "why does shadowplay look better than OBS", which doesn't make sense to me, since they are both using NVEnc, and the program using it shouldn't make a difference. Also, "How to make OBS look like Shadowplay" threads, which are almost always concluded that NVEnc looks like crap either way, so why bother trying to get it the same crappy, and just use x264. But, the same crappy quality is never found, so the question is unresolved. Then I encountered this piece of advice from Timothy003:
This all seemed to agree with my testing. So it appears that NVDefault would be the best preset to choose to match Shadowplay's quality. So the only issue really is that it is not available under OBS Studio, only OBS Classic.
If NVDefault is one of the presets that NVEnc already understands, one of the official nvidia presets, then it should just be in the list. I am speculating, but I think it was left out because it seemed redundant, especially if normally adding B-frames to x264 encodes has only a positive effect. Given that knowledge, it would be smart to assume NVDefault was unnecessary and leave it out, an improvement over classic maybe even... more streamlined. But, it seems that NVEnc does not behave as expected, the B-frames have a negative impact, and that preset did in fact have some usefulness. And, leaving it out has left us unable to choose the actual highest quality option.
My brother refuses to use OBS because he is convinced that Shadowplay's NVEnc looks better than OBS's. As a result, he records stupid videos where he cannot hide the steam overlay, and they look really unprofessional. So I am trying to convince him that he should just use OBS, where he has more control over everything. But he is stubborn because of the quality difference.
I didn't want to believe him about it, because shadowplay is severely limiting in every other regard, and I refuse to use it myself. But after realizing that OBS Classic had the NVDefault preset, I thought maybe that was a useable solution. I did some comparison tests between OBS Classic with NVDefault vs OBS Studio with High Quality vs Shadowplay. I determined that the NVDefault looked pretty much identical to Shadowplay, but the High Quality looked more blocky, making it seem overall lower quality.
I found many threads about "why does shadowplay look better than OBS", which doesn't make sense to me, since they are both using NVEnc, and the program using it shouldn't make a difference. Also, "How to make OBS look like Shadowplay" threads, which are almost always concluded that NVEnc looks like crap either way, so why bother trying to get it the same crappy, and just use x264. But, the same crappy quality is never found, so the question is unresolved. Then I encountered this piece of advice from Timothy003:
This all seemed to agree with my testing. So it appears that NVDefault would be the best preset to choose to match Shadowplay's quality. So the only issue really is that it is not available under OBS Studio, only OBS Classic.
If NVDefault is one of the presets that NVEnc already understands, one of the official nvidia presets, then it should just be in the list. I am speculating, but I think it was left out because it seemed redundant, especially if normally adding B-frames to x264 encodes has only a positive effect. Given that knowledge, it would be smart to assume NVDefault was unnecessary and leave it out, an improvement over classic maybe even... more streamlined. But, it seems that NVEnc does not behave as expected, the B-frames have a negative impact, and that preset did in fact have some usefulness. And, leaving it out has left us unable to choose the actual highest quality option.
