Question / Help Please help me pick the best encoder and settings.

[Mikeqnit457]

Hi guys, i want to get into streaming again but a lot has changed both in OBS and my setup since i did it last time and i just can't figure out the best settings for me.
I've got a 4790k with a gtx 970, so i can stream using quicksync, nvenc or just software x264 encoding. My target bitrate is 4500, though i might have to drop it to 4000 if the connection is bad once i start streaming, for now I'm just comparing the encoders and quality settings.
I recorded these clips following a very similar route in CoM, they are flagged with the encoder, settings and the scaling, 0 sample for bilinear and 16 sample for bicubic, not using lanczos since I'm scaling everything down. All of the clips are recorded at 30fps in either 720p or 960x540 because i had a feeling it might scale better to 1080p, 540p clips are marked as such. I'm using EposVox's "secret sauce" settings for x264 software encoding. For nvenc and quicksync I'm using "high" profile and "best quality"/"quality" settings.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yYrC_i0I7Egg6mJ_XgkKoRX7s73J6YEm/view?usp=sharing
Any advice on how to pick and tune the encoders or which of those clips seems to looks best would be MUCH appreciated, since I've been beating my head against this for hours trying to pixel peep at the smallest detail and doing multiple runs, to the point that most quality differences just seem random to me. I would love to stick with either one of the hardware encoders unless the difference in image quality of x264 would be very noticeable for performance reasons, considering that I'm on a single pc 4 core setup. I don't know if it has any impact on this but I'm going to restream to twitch, youtube and mixer, maybe more platforms for greater discoverability.
Thanks for any help in advance, and if this is not the right place to ask for this sort of help, I'm sorry, and if you know where my question would fit in better, please point me in the right direction!

 

[koala]

Use Tools->Auto Configuration Wizard, and if asked, use Nvenc (new) as encoder. Don't use settings found on some guides or videos on Youtube, because these settings correspond to the computer the maker of the video is using, not to the computer you are using.

 

[Mikeqnit457]

Use Tools->Auto Configuration Wizard, and if asked, use Nvenc (new) as encoder. Don't use settings found on some guides or videos on Youtube, because these settings correspond to the computer the maker of the video is using, not to the computer you are using.

Thanks, i know about the auto configuration, i was hoping to get some more advanced advice on which encoder would work best with my setup and how to fine tune it to get the best out of my limited hardware and bandwidth.

 

[koala]

That's exactly what the auto configuration does. It checks your system and does some automated test encoding to see what settings work best for your limited hardware and bandwidth.

You don't need to fine tune a set of thousand parameters. The defaults work best, they are already fine tuned. You only need to do the general decisions: resolution, fps, encoder, rate control, quality or bitrate. Exactly this is what the auto configuration figures out for your system.

I hope you don't expect to find some secret settings that magically doubles the encoding performance. There is no such secret, because if there were such highly efficient settings, they would be made default immediately so everyone can benefit from this. Every hardware has its limit, and this is a hard limit that cannot be overcome with any magic setting.