Why is x264 working better than NVENC for me? (Low game FPS)

[JustDeBreezy]

Hi guys,

I'm new to the streaming community. I've been playing games for a while now, and have started streaming for over a year now.
Usually I stream 'Escape From Tarkov' and I haven't ran into any issues when using NVENC encoding until the recent release of Call of Duty: MW2.

I'm running a Gigabyte RTX 3070 (vision) 8gb VRAM paired with a i7-9700k CPU. However since playing the new CoD I have been getting frame drops in my gameplay which dips down to 90fps. When I'm not streaming, I get a constant 120 if not dips to 110 running at 1080p. I've tried lowering my streams resolution scale to 720p, dropping my fps to 30, running as administrator, optimized the game as much as possible, disabling the preview window and running MSI afterburner to get the maximum performance I can get. I run at a 4500 bitrate. I definitely need that 110-120fps for the game advantage.

Weirdly, I find myself getting better performance when using the x264 encoder which doesn't seem right as my GPU should be able to handle the load with the NVENC chip.

The first log file is with x264 and the second is with NVENC.

Appreciate any help.

 

[JustDeBreezy]

Bump

 

[AaronD]

As you probably know, NVENC does the math-intensive stuff on the graphics card, while x264 does it on the CPU. Normally, it's faster to do it on the card because the assumption is that it's not competing with anything else. So it has the entire GPU to itself to do the compression and encoding on, and the CPU only needs to calculate what each frame needs to be in the first place. (probably just a single '=' sign, if it's just the one source full-screen)

But you're also playing a graphics-intensive game. That is also designed with the assumption that it has the entire GPU to itself, and is probably written quite cleverly to squeeze every last bit of performance it can out of that GPU.

Either one by itself is fine, but both together is too much. Thus, better performance to let the game take the entire GPU like it wants, while the CPU does ALL of the video production.