Does AMD’s GPU Encoder Suck? 6900XT Streaming!

I hear a lot of people saying AMD’s GPU encoder sucks, or is significantly worse than NVENC, enough that some would buy an often higher priced NVIDIA card just to have NVENC, over AMD’s option. But, is it actually terrible? Well, I’ve got a 6900XT and I’ll be damned if it’s going to go to waste while its here, so lets get testing! But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!

This test became an absolute wormhole of factors, making me run more and more tests to the point where I couldn’t control the factors well enough to get sensible results. So, I have to limit the scope – I’m only going to be showing results using the respective cards drivers to record the footage. Using a program like OBS would make for a good follow up/part 2 of this test, but there is already so much to show just with their drivers, so I’ll start with that.

This first thing I thought to test was recording – relatively high bitrate, enough to give great quality footage to edit and upload to youtube, rather than to immediately stream. So, 30Mb/s, at both 1080p60, and 1440p60, and with a couple of games: Watchdogs Legion for its canned benchmark making it really easy to directly compare; Cyberpunk because everyone is either playing or streaming it right now; and COD MW for fast paced FPS gameplay, and because Warzone is still really popular despite Activision’s attempts to kill it with Cold War promotions – and guns.

So, lets take a look at some clips. Like I said, the Watchdogs one is easy to have side by side, and, yep, no difference. I’ll throw some clips up of the other games too, but suffice to say at this relatively high bitrate the encoders don’t have to work all that hard to compress this footage as they’ve got more than enough bits available to do it. COD is a bit harder, as it’s fast paced. With Watchdogs the camera moves slowly through the scene so not much changes per frame, versus COD where in a couple of frames you can literally 360. But, again, no major flaws between them.

Next, I thought I’d test streaming bitrates – specifically 6Mb/s which is Twitch’s maximum supported bitrate. AMD’s driver lets you do that just fine, but NVIDIA? No no no, 10Mb/s is the lower limit. I’m sure if you hooked up the driver to Twitch and streamed directly, it would work it out, but for ‘recording’, 10Mb/s is as low as it gets.

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So, finally, there is the 10Mb/s shootout. And actually, there’s a decent difference.

The thing is though, those clips you saw from the AMD card, were using HEVC – H265 – whereas NVIDIA only offers the less efficient H264 codec. Now, if you wanted to stream direct-from-driver, you’d need H264 enabled, but for recording there is no reason not to use the better H265 option. But, this wouldn’t be a complete test without looking at direct like-for-like performance both using H264, so lets look.

So yeah, if you run exact like-for-like, NVENC is better. It’s not the difference between a stream being unwatchable and not, but it is just about noticeable enough while watching the clips in faster paced games like COD. Again, this is just using the drivers to record the footage, and at 10Mb/s, not the 6 you’d need for streaming to Twitch, something that using OBS should let us test.

If, however, you want to use the drivers just to record footage, AMD’s implementation wins out thanks to it supporting H265, meaning you can get better recording quality, and smaller file sizes. Sure, you can just whack the bitrate up on NVIDIA to counter that, but file size increases which can be a pain for those of us without 10s of terabytes of NAS space available.

In reality, you won’t really notice a difference between the two in footage quality at higher bitrates, and at lower ones, you are often better off using your CPU to encode anyway so it’s up to you. Both are serviceable, although NVIDIA definitely has a slight edge.