OBS Studio Update – Improves NVIDIA’s NVENC Encoding by 60%

A major update has been drop on OBS Studio with their latest v23 update. The new update is the improvement of their existing NVIDIA NVENC Encoding that improves the video encoding by up to 60% which will give more FPS and higher quality during streaming and recording.

The NVIDIA VIDEO CODEC is a hardware dedicated video encoding (NVDEC) and decoding (NVENC) powered by NVIDIA Graphics card that offloads the compute-intensive task from CPU to render the video. The game performance is also less affected, as the processes for decoding video is separated from the CUDA cores which performs the rendering of graphics.

Upon testing the new update, we’ve seen some 30 to 40% improves on using GTX 10 series graphics card and 50 to 60% improves on using GTX 20 series. The improve is in terms of lag, and picture quality.

Here is the patch note of the OBS V23 updates for NVENC:

NVENC and Encoding Improvements (Windows)

• A new implementation of NVENC has been added which has improved performance, reducing system and resource impact. Note that the new implementation is not available on Windows 7 due to limitations in the operating system; the old implementation will be used instead in that case.
• Added new features to the new NVENC implementation:
  • Psycho-visual Tuning: Enables encoder settings that optimize the use of bitrate for increased perceived visual quality, especially in situations with high motion, at the cost of increased GPU utilization.
  • Look-ahead: Enables dynamic B-frames. If disabled, the encoder will always use the number of B-frames specified in the ‘Max B-frames’ setting. If enabled, it will increase visual quality by only using however many B-frames are necessary, up to the maximum, at the cost of increased GPU utilization.

To see the whole patch notes, you may see it on GitHub https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases/tag/23.0.0-rc2