Question / Help NVENC encoding in modern NVIDIA Cards better than X264??

[Baked_brotatoes]

Based on the history, virtually everyone agrees that X264 process encoding is better... HOWEVER:
I was watching a stream with Ninja and KingRichard the other night when Ninja's stream was dropping frames and his quality was poor. He has a dedicated capture computer using X264. KingRichard mentioned that encoding with the NVIDIA card is actually better for graphics cards that were made in the past year (or so), with its updated processor. A very skeptical Ninja changed his settings from X264 to NVENC, and the stream looked and ran better.

Here is another post on this, but it may not have accounted for advances NVIDIA has put in over the past year or so: https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/comparison-of-x264-nvenc-quicksync-vce.57358/

My questions are the following:
1. Is the encoding now better using NVENC with a recent graphics card?
2. If so, which graphics cards support this encoding?
3. Has anyone repeated a quality comparison recently? (Like was done in link)

 

[TryHD]

1. Is the encoding now better using NVENC with a recent graphics card?

better than x264 not even close. Better than NVENC on older graphic cards, yes, but still far away from suitable for high quality streaming

 

[koala]

A NVENC-encoded video is better than x.264, if the streamer overloads the encoding PC while using x.264 and the stream misses some frames because of that. Or if the game fps is suffering from the high CPU demand from the encoder. With NVENC, the CPU demand is much lower and no frames are skipped and any game runs full speed. But if the encoding PC is able to encode video with x.264 "veryfast" and no skipped frames, that is better than NVENC.

The quality comparison in that thread is still valid and up to date for NVENC, since current Nvidia cards are still using the same Pascal chip architecture since Pascal release 2016. At least I read nothing about NVENC being made better in newer Pascal chips. Historically, such a thing was not done for previous chip architectures, so probably not for the current one as well.

 

[Baked_brotatoes]

The quality comparison in that thread is still valid and up to date for NVENC, since current Nvidia cards are still using the same Pascal chip architecture since Pascal release 2016. At least I read nothing about NVENC being made better in newer Pascal chips. Historically, such a thing was not done for previous chip architectures, so probably not for the current one as well.

Thanks Koala! I was just looking at this as well. It looks like the Pascal architecture is the major change for the encoding performance boost: so all GeForce GTX 950 and above would support this.