Using a Second Card as Encoder

[Bank_CW]

Running an Ryzen 7 5700G and an AMD Rx6600 but some of my OBS plugins and scenes can be very demanding on system resources.. i.e just using the Background Remover w/ Chroma filters for my webcam can snag 10-15% more cpu usage alone. I was looking at adding a Radeon Firepro V3800 just to handle encoding... Is it even a possibility or would I be looking at further issues... its a single gaming pc and what i really need is a dedicated encoding card to free up the cpu and gfx card to focus on gaming...

Thoughts and suggestions please

 

[koala]

It's not recommended to add a second GPU just for video encoding. It's usually not as successful as you think. It's creating new resource bottlenecks that impact performance. If it's even possible to use a hardware encoder on secondary AMD cards, I don't know. I didn't see any example on the forum. The Firepro V3800 you mention is from 2010. It doesn't have any VCE hardware encoder, so it cannot be used for this purpose.
For your purposes, a Nvidia GPU (GTX 1050 and above) as only GPU is probably the best solution. It has the very good Nvenc hardware encoder, which gives way better quality then AMD VCE, and it has almost zero impact on performance if used on a single GPU system.

 

[Bank_CW]

Appreciate the input, so short of the second pc setup there isn't really an encoder card option or as you said a second GPU would not be a resolution, Even with the Ryzen 7 5700G GFU side sitting dormant and unused which seems to be a shame not to use that side of the cpu..

 

[FerretBomb]

Appreciate the input, so short of the second pc setup there isn't really an encoder card option or as you said a second GPU would not be a resolution, Even with the Ryzen 7 5700G GFU side sitting dormant and unused which seems to be a shame not to use that side of the cpu..

Correct. A dedicated 'encoder card' just causes a TON of problems. It splits the PCIe lanes from 16x to 8x/8x, and increases the now-reduced PCIe bus utilization significantly to boot, as all the video data has to be transferred to the second card, instead of handled in place on a 1-GPU setup.

A single-GPU, generally nVidia given how good NVENC is at video encoding with no rendering resource impact, is highly recommended. At this point, Turing NVENC has effectively rendered 2PC setups pointless newbie-bait aside from some very rare edge-case scenarios. The return on time, expense, additional power draw, complexity of setup, audio routing headaches, inflexibility of capture, and additional potential points of failure introduced do not measure up, when Turing NVENC encodes on-par with x264 Slow to begin with, with no performance hit.

The 'background remover' is going to be CPU-intensive regardless though. Get a greenscreen and light it properly. Chromakeying is a very simple and lightweight process, compared to CV-based 'removal'.