Question / Help What should I use? x264 or NVENC?

Sapiens

Sapiens

Forum Moderator
x264 provides superior compression to hardware encoders like NVENC and Quick Sync. Since you have a very capable CPU you should be using x264 whenever possible.
 
ubuntuaddicted

ubuntuaddicted

Member
at only 1,000Kbps stream would the quality difference between x264 versus quick sync really be visible? I am sort of in the same boat, I have an i5-4670k and I figured i would just take some load off the cpu and put it on the igpu since otherwise it would go unused.

I have been using quick sync lately and my viewers say my stream looks great and or they don't see a difference from before when i was just using x264. Thoughts?

Now for local recordings I can see why you would want to use the better compression encoder but for livestreams that are 720p at 3,000Kbps can you really tell the difference between x264 (the cpu) and quick sync (the igpu)
 
Sapiens

Sapiens

Forum Moderator
ubuntuaddicted said:
at only 1,000Kbps stream would the quality difference between x264 versus quick sync really be visible?
Click to expand...
I believe the difference becomes more noticeable at lower bitrates, but it would only take you a few minutes to test both and compare for yourself.
 
Boildown

Boildown

Active Member
The only way x264 and NVENC are possibly at parity on a quality per bitrate type of scale is if you set x264 to UltraFast preset. If you can use any better preset than UltraFast (such as OBS' default of Very Fast), then x264 wins hands down.

By the way, the next gen "Maxwell" Nvidia GPUs have improved quality and performance over the current "Kepler" generation, but A) its only available on the 750 and 750Ti so far, and B) its quality per bitrate still isn't as good as x264 Very Fast.
 
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