Wednesday, May 3rd 2023
NVIDIA Claims its AV1 Video Encoder is Superior to AMD and Intel's Alternatives
In a blog post, NVIDIA claims that its AV1 video encoder is vastly superior in terms of quality, compared to both AMD and Intel's alternatives. The still shot provided by NVIDIA to show its superior quality over its competitors, was encoded at 4K60p, obviously using the AV1 codec. Nvidia used its own GeForce RTX 4080 card and compared it to an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and an Intel Arc A770, with all three cards encoding the video at 12 Mbps using the latest release of OBS Studio.
It just so happens that OBS Studio 29.1 added support for AV1 over the Enhanced Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) and now allows for live streaming using AV1 to YouTube. This is also the main reason for the NVIDIA blog post, as prior to this release, it wasn't possible to stream using AV1 in OBS Studio. NVIDIA has been known for the quality of its video encoder for quite some time, but we'd like to see some independent testing before we give NVIDIA the win here, especially as the company has only provided a single screenshot as proof of its superiority.
Source:
NVIDIA
It just so happens that OBS Studio 29.1 added support for AV1 over the Enhanced Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) and now allows for live streaming using AV1 to YouTube. This is also the main reason for the NVIDIA blog post, as prior to this release, it wasn't possible to stream using AV1 in OBS Studio. NVIDIA has been known for the quality of its video encoder for quite some time, but we'd like to see some independent testing before we give NVIDIA the win here, especially as the company has only provided a single screenshot as proof of its superiority.
45 Comments on NVIDIA Claims its AV1 Video Encoder is Superior to AMD and Intel's Alternatives
Following EpoxVox that claim is a bit much, but maybe a testament to Nvidias marketing, because really it goes back and forth a lot:
Notice here that Intel's Quicksync H264 quality is higher then Nvenc.
AMD was indeed pathetically behind, they did not take it seriously which is just bad but these days they are doing quite well as well, as an example:
And indeed, ill wait for Epox to do a video on it to show which is best and how much it matters.
Even if your own habits go opposite to the mainstream ones , it doesn't change the fact that for the most part of regular streamers in the world this wont change much until twitch implements it, if they ever do.
And nobody who wants to make it as a streamer would use youtube? I mean maybe if you are a gamer....but ya know, people stream other stuff than that and youtube is perfectly fine for that, but if you have some data you would like to share that proves otherwise, by all means share it.
PS: i'm not a twitch supporter against youtube. I actually think youtube is better just for AV1. But too few ppl on it to be relevant.
I've been thinking of making a short AV1 test on my 7900 xt to see what the quality is. I expect nothing good from h264, but from AV1, it's going to be interesting.
I used to use x264 cpu encoding which I think is king, it has downsides though that its hard to use when playing a game on the same system, and its very power hungry. But you get both better quality and smaller files from it. Had to stop using it when energy crisis started.
I then tried NVENC using what was available on OBSS, and I found a combination of lower quality and much bigger files, the file size was the main issue. I did consider doing it this way on very high quality settings, then uploading my videos to a server in a DC, reencoding in the DC using their power, and then downloading again to get smaller files, but probably not viable until I get decent internet upload speeds.
I am now using a plugin in OBSS that allows H265 using NVENC, this significantly improved the filesizes, but is some frame drops as the encoder chip cant handle it at times, and the quality is still worse than cpu encoding.
All this stuff is why I have an interest in the new GPU's for encoding.
The cool thing of youtube is that your stream stays saved, so Adam Savage for example makes youtube videos but also streams stuff on youtube and it all just adds to his channel, on twitch you can only be live so its not really a good comparison in that way.
anywho, bit of the ol google:
videogames.si.com/news/most-popular-youtube-streamers-2022
sooo does that counter your "data" or what does this mean?
(unrelated, pretty sad to read here about the most watched person being apparently a complete piece of crap, has everyone gone morally bankrupt or what)
Unless you also meant the gaming community is laughably small?
Valkyrae Accidentally Reveals How Much Money She Makes on YouTube (gamerant.com)
Personally I think as a viewer, the YT experience is way better than twitch, especially now twitch has gone complete crazy with the ad's they run.
When I last went on twitch I was cycling between channels to watch and about 70% of the time I had to wait for a 30 second advert before the stream came on.
Not that YT is great, but it's not THAT bad... I expect that we'll see the Alveo M35 be the change for it. Scalability is going to be a lot less expensive. We'll see by early next year I expect?
I tried a few scripts on tampermonkey but they just made it too glitchy.
What my friend does is run ad rolls every 30 minutes which should exempt ad rolls when people join, as he hates the pre roll ad's like me, they can kill a small/medium channel easily.
Twitch turbo exempts most of the ad's, I have been thinking over it.
www.youtube.com/live/60b2Ml-E06o?feature=share
i still love the tweakability of X.264 and im doing research on all the different switches for SVT-AV1
still tweaking x264
www.youtube.com/live/9cxWOEVpmLU?feature=share&t=538
Twitch was the birthplace of modern games streaming and it's still the absolute household name in most high value...everything. Tournaments, trials, speedrunning, almost all of the bigger events that pertain to videogames happen on Twitch before anywhere else. Youtube's efforts into branching into streaming have been decent technically, AV1 and all that, but their entire frontend is catastrophically bad compared to twitch. Chat's poorly set, CPU usage is or was absurd, rest of the page is too bloated, video viewport is designed for watching, not livestreaming, etc.
While you can easily criticize Twitch for its monopolistic position and not leaving any room for actual competition, they are still the absolute top for actual livestreaming and interacting with your chat.
Youtube has a lot of dev work to do to equal it in livestream usability. As for the smaller ones like Hitbox, they never really reached an added value that would bring a lot of people to leave Twitch.