NVENC vs VCE – AMD vs NVIDIA – Streaming
|So, you want to stream but you have a mid to low end CPU and can’t afford the performance hit that using the X264 takes, so you turn to your graphics card’s built in hardware encoder, NVENC on Nvidia and VCE on AMD. Which of those is better? Which takes more of a performance hit? Lets test them and find out, but first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
Lets start with footage quality. I recorded at 1080p, and used the “High quality” preset in OBS, and used either AMD or NVIDIA hardware encoders. I used an RX 5700XT for our AMD card, and what’s probably its closest rival from team green, an RTX 2070. As we are talking I’ll switch between clips from card A, and card B. The cards will stay the same, and I want you to let me know which card you think is which, and why in the comments below.
Looking at the footage as your viewers would, they both look pretty decent. Of course it’s 1080p, so it’s not the crispest footage in the world, but there aren’t any obvious or glaring issues I could see. Even looking at the explosion in Battlefield 5, both recordings even show the shockwave it creates, and while the edges of the smaller pieces of debris are a little blocky, that’s only really visible when we zoom in.
This is 80x zoom, which is way, way too close for comfort but shows you the blockiness of that debris – although honestly that’s more likely due to it being 1080p footage stretched so much. Both of these, to me anyway, look about as crisp and clear as they could be, and I’d have no problem watching these streams, from a video perspective anyway.
When it comes to COD MW, it’s the same story. Both cards played this well too. I couldn’t obviously notice any issues with the footage, other than my terrible skills of course, whether on team green or team red. Even at 80x zoom, both seem about as clear as they’ll get for this kind of recording.
So, seen enough to make your conclusions? Again let me know in the comments what you think! Feel free to pause the video to write your comments. Sorted? Alright. A was AMD, and B was NVIDIA. So that’s the footage, what about your playing experience? As you might expect, you don’t lose much here. I would say that you are more likely to find larger variances in what you do in game, than streaming vs not, so thumbs up there.
COD MW 1080p | AVG Normal | 1% Low Normal | AVG Streamed | 1% Low Streamed | FPS Lost | % Lost |
VCE (AMD) | 154.9 | 125.7861635 | 147.37 | 113.7656428 | 7.53 | 4.861200775 |
NVENC (NVIDIA) | 122.36 | 98.81422925 | 119.8 | 94.16195857 | 2.56 | 2.092186989 |
BFV 1080p | AVG Normal | 1% Low Normal | AVG Streamed | 1% Low Streamed | FPS Lost | % Lost |
VCE (AMD) | 130.49 | 114.8105626 | 129.58 | 112.2334456 | 0.91 | 0.6973714461 |
NVENC (NVIDIA) | 121.3 | 107.7586207 | 118.68 | 98.61932939 | 2.62 | 2.159934048 |
The conclusion here is that whatever GPU you have, you can get a great experience for you and your viewers with the hardware encoder. I don’t know that I could pick one over the other, and I even asked you guys on Twitter and while the answers were mostly A – AMD – that seemed to be thanks to the in game effects looking better in that shot, so it seems no matter what GPU you go with, you can rest assured you’ll get a great streaming experience from it.