NVIDIA Claims its AV1 Video Encoder is Superior to AMD and Intel's Alternatives

[Mahboi]

Isn’t twitch mostly e-girls? Some sell bath water and it was like moon sugar for some…..

Your contempt is as clever as it is sharp. Sharp like a club cutting a piece of red meat.

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.

 

[evernessince]

One streamer I know who considered YT, said the issue is there is no big streamers on there to raid him, the issue is basically where most of the streaming community is, so its kind of a closed loop problem.

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.

That's definitely a problem as well but the biggest problem for YT streaming is that discoverability it god aweful, beyond bad. I watch streams on Twitch but it's nearly impossible to find a stream on YouTube. I have to know the name of the streamer and search it, which makes no sense because people aren't going to be able to do that unless they already watch twitch. Streamers are so buried and hard to find, it's just vastly more convenient to watch on Twitch. That's coming from someone who knows what they are looking for, if you don't it's unlikely that YouTube will ever start recommending you steams. Mind you YouTube's algorithm tends to have an issue with recommending like content in general, where I find it only recommends content directly related to what I'm watching and never something I find new and interesting. It's extremely stale IMO.

The community experience is much better on twitch as well. Better chat, better emotes, ect.

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.

Well said.

YouTube doesn't have to invent the wheel like Twitch did with streaming, it should be easier for them to match their features. I guess there are consequences to Google sitting on it's monopoly for over a decade, the company is lazy and likely to be overcome by competitors.

 

[mechtech]

…..and……

Im not going to buy a 4080 to save on 15 minutes a day on a few watts of youtube a day nvidia……I can buy a lot of electricity for the cost of a 4080. I probably wouldn’t be in the market for a 4080 if all I did was watch youtube either.

But good marketing trying to get people to buy them though. Should market it starting at a $100 card if they even exist and all the way up. Good for pointing it out maybe it will get the competition to compete more? Not saying good HW enc/dec isn’t a good thing, but when most people watch it on their phone it’s a moot point. Other thing is if video is not stuttering do most people even know or care? It’s only when video stutters that you hear about it.

Most large CPUs and gpus can chew threw it like nothing. This helps most when it’s in small chips or when it’s not like the 6400 cough cough

 

[unwind-protect]

Is there a history describing the evolution of nvenc and which steps included image quality updates?

 

[N3utro]

Valkyrae makes 171k$ a month from YouTube, and she managed to clearly dominate the monthly viewership a few times. And many popular streamers also happen to have a merch store...it's a bit hard to find a popular streamer who doesn't cash out on its popularity by expending into merch
Valkyrae Accidentally Reveals How Much Money She Makes on YouTube (gamerant.com)
View attachment 294314

Valkyrae - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"On January 13, 2020, Hofstetter left Twitch for an exclusive streaming contract on YouTube."

So she got famous by streaming on twitch, then after becoming famous enough she moved to youtube for financial reasons.

Which means without twitch she wouldn't be where she is now. Thank you for proving my point.

Not everyone streams games though...

Not everyone on twitch streams games either

 

[sLowEnd]

Nvidia's encoder is definitely better than AMD & Intel's when doing H.264, but from what I've heard AV1 is a wash between the three.

 

[Dr. Dro]

At least AMD has improved their horrible encoder after God knows how many years. NVIDIA may still be better (what a shocker), but with the prices they charge and the gap having shrunk considerably, I don't think it's mandatory for a streamer or self-respected archivist to run a GeForce in about 95% of cases anymore.

As for Intel... no one can beat their prices for the encoding segment. People are buying Arc A380 cards for their encoder alone. But I don't think Nvidia cares.

 

[R-T-B]

My data is: cite me one popular youtube streamer who lives from his/her revenues from streaming exclusively on youtube.

Maybe I don't care if I am popular.

My use for streaming is actually to remote control my hardware, so I happen to be the sole viewer. We exist.

 

[dyonoctis]

Valkyrae - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"On January 13, 2020, Hofstetter left Twitch for an exclusive streaming contract on YouTube."

So she got famous by streaming on twitch, then after becoming famous enough she moved to youtube for financial reasons.

Which means without twitch she wouldn't be where she is now. Thank you for proving my point.


Not everyone on twitch streams games either

Popular twitch streamers getting poached by YouTube doesn't make them suddenly less relevant. Their career didn't just died from switching platforms. And big channels are doing live content on YouTube, even if they don't classify as being full time streamers. I don't argue that Twitch isn't de facto platform for streaming, but the streaming functionality of YouTube isn't a dead feature either.
Look at this guy already having 341k total views 3 hours after his stream.

And people without contract can stream on both platform at the same time. Game dev streams are often simultaneous on YouTube and twitch. We didn't start the debate about "Can you make it big as a YouTube streamer from the start" but "Is there any successful people who are using the streaming functionality of YouTube". And as it's been said : AV1 is also coming to twitch anyway

 

[Mysteoa]

Yes, fight. Make AMD finally work hard on its encoder.

 

[Scrizz]

I miss ATi

 

[zlobby]

Yes, fight. Make AMD finally work hard on its encoder.

It's 2023 and it's a real shame how far away are AMD in terms of decent hardware support for modern AV codecs.

 

[ZoneDymo]

It's 2023 and it's a real shame how far away are AMD in terms of decent hardware support for modern AV codecs.

Watch EpoxVox, its a lot closer these days then before, to the point where its all fine to use.

 

[Mahboi]

It's 2023 and it's a real shame how far away are AMD in terms of decent hardware support for modern AV codecs.

Have you even looked at it before making claims? The AMD AV1 encoder is very decent.
It's the h264 that is, and will remain, worthless. And their h265 has been great for a long time now.

Watch EpoxVox, its a lot closer these days then before, to the point where its all fine to use.

EposVox.

 

[zlobby]

Have you even looked at it before making claims? The AMD AV1 encoder is very decent.
It's the h264 that is, and will remain, worthless. And their h265 has been great for a long time now.

Uhm, OK.

 

[THU31]

I'm playing around with AV1 encoding in OBS on my 4070.

My initial impression with 720p60 @ 4000 kbps was not great, but today I tested 1080p60 @ 6000 kbps (the go to setting on Twitch) and it actually looks really good. It looks much better than x264 CPU encoding at the same bitrate (but subjectively worse when compared to CPU 8000 kbps).

All encoders have their pros and cons. NVENC definitely has a bit of a smeary look, with both H.264 and AV1. But AV1 has very few visible macroblocks in motion, and it seems to adapt to motion much faster than H.264 or CPU x264.

CPU x264 encoding still seems to offer the most detailed image in motion, but it definitely has a lot of small macroblocks. It's detailed, but very dirty. But CPU encoding for 1080p60 requires a ridiculous amount of CPU power (my 9700KF @ 4.2 GHz can't handle it, drops 50% of frames while doing it using the medium preset, without any gaming load, as I was capturing from a PS5).

The AV1 encoder has almost no impact on GPU usage or power consumption. That is seriously impressive considering the image quality. For a single system setup it's just fantastic.

 

[unwind-protect]

I'm playing around with AV1 encoding in OBS on my 4070.

My initial impression with 720p60 @ 4000 kbps was not great, but today I tested 1080p60 @ 6000 kbps (the go to setting on Twitch) and it actually looks really good. It looks much better than x264 CPU encoding at the same bitrate (but subjectively worse when compared to CPU 8000 kbps).

All encoders have their pros and cons. NVENC definitely has a bit of a smeary look, with both H.264 and AV1. But AV1 has very few visible macroblocks in motion, and it seems to adapt to motion much faster than H.264 or CPU x264.

CPU x264 encoding still seems to offer the most detailed image in motion, but it definitely has a lot of small macroblocks. It's detailed, but very dirty. But CPU encoding for 1080p60 requires a ridiculous amount of CPU power (my 9700KF @ 4.2 GHz can't handle it, drops 50% of frames while doing it using the medium preset, without any gaming load, as I was capturing from a PS5).

The AV1 encoder has almost no impact on GPU usage or power consumption. That is seriously impressive considering the image quality. For a single system setup it's just fantastic.

Thanks for the info. If you don't mind me asking, why do you not mess around with h.265?

 

[Dr. Dro]

Thanks for the info. If you don't mind me asking, why do you not mess around with h.265?

Irrelevant codec due to licensing issues. HEVC (h.265) and VVC (h.266) patents prevent its widespread adoption.

 

[THU31]

I'm mostly testing settings you can use for streaming. For recording it doesn't really matter, bitrate is not much of an issue. I can use NVENC H.264 @ 40 Mbps for 1080p60 and it looks amazing.

I'm actually not a fan of HEVC for SDR content, especially 8-bit. It handles dark sections rather poorly. I use 12-bit HEVC sometimes for encoding videos in MeGUI. That offers almost transparent quality at low bitrates, but it doesn't support DXVA.

Here's a 1-minute sample of the AV1 recording - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j73m-LGOR_mIE7K3tC9AlnUTkCcNTsVO/view

 

[R-T-B]

Have you even looked at it before making claims? The AMD AV1 encoder is very decent.
It's the h264 that is, and will remain, worthless. And their h265 has been great for a long time now.

Most remote gaming setups need h264 for lowest latency decode when streaming, so great.

 

[Mahboi]

As a follow up, I've tested the AMD AMF AV1 encoder on Youtube.
At 1080p 60 fps, the image is nothing to write home about. It's better than h264 no question, but it's "better", not revolutionary.
I also tested at 4K 60, extensively (a dozen setups, a dozen hours). The 7900 xt basically couldn't handle it. OBS kept throwing "encoder overcharged" errors. It's SUPPOSED to run 4K60, but if you're already using the card to game, and especially if you're gaming above 60 fps, it's a total bust. I did get bits (several minutes) of successful 60 fps stream at 4K with a 60 fps game, but for my games, the downgrade from 144hz or even 95hz was too severe. 95hz was a minimum acceptable.

So I guess it'll be 1440p 120Hz rather than any kind of 4K60 in the near future.

Edit: I then compared the 1080p vid next to a pro streamer's h264 image from Twitch. My image is very close to equal, and I know that this man uses a whole second PC with a 5950x to software encode his h264 stream. So at the very least, the "basic" image from any AV1 encoder seems like it's already "pro level". Just need to get that 4K60 stream to actually work without being clogged all the time...