Question / Help NVENC Quality Settings

[Toffees]

Hi,

I've been playing with the NVEnc encoding option and although I can see a benefit in a reduction of load on my CPU over normal x264 encoding, the quality of my stream whilst playing WoW has dropped considerably. If I stand still the stream looks perfect (identical to CPU x264), but as soon as I start to move around I get serious 'blockies' appearing and it looks terrible. Switching back to CPU x264 mode and no such issues (except my CPU loading jumps up considerably). So, are the any specific settings I need to use in order to get the best out of NVEnc encoding?

I'm streaming at 1080p / 30FPS at 3500kb/s over a 10Mbit upload connection.

Thanks
Matt

 

[Krazy]

This is the limitation of a hardware encoder like NVENC, unfortunately. Consumer level hardware encoding chips just can't match the quality you've come to expect from x264. With NVENC you trade quality for performance.

NVENC is much better suited to local recording at a high bitrate for later editing, not really streaming.

 

[Boildown]

The only hardware encoder that reportedly does a decent job (and I haven't tested it myself), is Intel's HD Graphics 4600 Quicksync, that comes with most of their mid to high end consumer CPUs. The rest are (imo) only good for saving to disk at a high bitrate. By the way, I use NVENC to save to disk at 20000 bitrate and it looks pretty nice, haven't tried stream with it yet, I should test that some time.