Question / Help Not sure which encoding method is best for my setup

[Max Xevious]

Hey all,

I have a question and not really finding a lot of info with "which is better".

My primary video card is a GTX Titan X and have been using NVENC for encoding, but I am building a new rig with a 8700k as the processor. I also have access to a Quadro P4000 to add as a secondary card to offload encoding to.

I am not sure which is best to run with, I know the Titan X has a better chipset for NVENC (and two of them), but will there be any improvement in performance if I were to offload to a 2nd video card that is dedicated for encoding?

Should I just say "screw NVENC" and go x264/x265 with my processor?

Thanks!

 

[RytoEX]

The Quadro P4000 should have the better NVENC chip, since that's a Pascal card and the TITAN X (not a TITAN Xp) is a Maxwell card. There is generally no performance improvement to offloading encoding to a separate GPU, especially since NVENC is a separate chip, it doesn't affect the card's render performance. You might get better quality per bitrate/filesize output by using NVENC on the Quadro though. While x264 will still give (slightly) better results, it's impossible to recommend it without knowing your hardware and how it currently performs in your setup. Providing a log file from an active session would give us a lot more insight.

The biggest gotcha with multiple graphics cards is you often end up starving the primary GPU or rest of the system of PCIe lanes/bandwidth.

 

[Max Xevious]

I am running an ASUS Z370 board so I am limited to 24 PCI lanes, that would force both cards to 8x/8x instead of one card at 16x so there is that.

I guess the best thing to do will be to test between single and multi card and see how it works.

Thanks for the info!