Why AMD H.264 is DIFFERENT from NVIDIA'S H.264 on OBS?

[madleonida]

Hello everyone.
I recently switched from an RTX 4060 to an AMD 7700XT and in terms of performance in game while streaming on both TWITCH & TIK TOK simultaneously the second gpu is far ahead but i have noticed that in the streaming settings of obs the amd's gpu encoder offers less options compared to the nvidia one even though they are both H.264... i have also noticed that the streams quality since i switched got pretty much worse and blurrier.

I wanted to know why the Nvidia encoder got 2/3 more options in the streaming settings such as "PRESET" and "MULTIPASS MODE".

Is this a bug that i can somehow fix or nvidia's gpu are just better in this context? Cause i think i'll have to switch back to nvidia if this is the case...

 

[sandrix]

Their operating principle is the same, but the implementation and number of algorithms for video compression are different. AMD just does very poorly at low bitrates and has a lot of problems. The current favorites are NVIDIA NVENC and Intel Quick Sync.

 

[koala]

Is this a bug that i can somehow fix or nvidia's gpu are just better in this context?

It's no bug. Nvenc is simply the better encoder. It's also better in terms of GPU computing resource usage, because the nvenc encoder is a dedicated circuit within the GPU, so encoding doesn't use up much regular 3D computing resources. For AMD GPUs, these computing resources are shared, so if some app (game) is using up all GPU computing resources, the encoder might start lagging behind. For Nvenc this is true to a much lesser extent.

If it comes to encoder options, this is implementation dependent. Both are implementing the h.264 specification, but how they do this is left to their own discretion. So the inner working within the encoder might differ between encoders, and so are the options. A h.264 encoder is not the same program code running everywhere. It's some different program code running as black box that's just creating the same file format as output by convention.

 

[madleonida]

Thank you guys for the reply... so you guys suggest me to go back to Nvidia right? Clearly sometimes it gets blurry with nvidia too but i noticed that the general quality of my live were much better back when i had my RTX 4060... hopefully i can get a good deal for a brand new RTX 4070 this black Friday.