Question / Help NVENC looking better than x264?

C

churvin

New Member
Hey everyone. I stream 3500kbps @ 60fps and I've just noticed that NVENC with "High" profile and "High Quality" looks significantly better than x264 on the Very Fast preset.

Slower presets for x264 look just as good (and better than) NVENC but looking around on the internet it says the "very fast" preset should in all cases look better than NVENC at the same bitrate, but instead I'm finding the opposite which doesn't seem right.

I guess I'm just a bit confused, is everything working right? has NVENC improved significantly over the past few years?
 
If you CPU is capable to encode x264 "veryfast" without overloading and without frame drops, then it produces about the same quality as nvenc on a Pascal chip (GTX 10x0). X264 gets worse if the encoder is overloaded, which result in frame drops. In this case, nvenc looks better, because the video looks smoother, since no frames are dropped. Even if the x264 encoder isn't overloaded, its high CPU demand may still steal CPU power from the game you're streaming, so the fps of the game drops or it stutters.
This scenario is common for not-high-end CPUs and happens probably quite often, since everyone seems to want to record at 60 fps, which doubles the CPU requirement in comparison to the old de-facto standard of 30 fps.
 
I did some testing with 720p60fps 3000 bitrate using x264 very fast and NVENC high quality, and honestly they look fairly similar. Only real big difference i noticed is that if you got webcam, in x264 it gets less pixelated than with NVENC. In my opinion the quality increase from x264 just isn't worth it when you are looking at the performance cost of using it, If you are only able to use VERY FAST preset.

For x264 I'm using ryzen 1700 at 3.7ghz and for NVENC i got 1070 ti. and i was testing the quality with Overwatch.
 
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