It’s hard to maintain your bearings as a viewer if you cannot tell who is shooting your favorite broadcaster. This is crucial for Twitch or Mixer because you don’t want your viewers struggling to read words in the game environment. NVENC, meanwhile, maintains their legibility. At a distance, X264 smudges words together to the point that you cannot read them. NVENC makes text more legibleįinally, and most importantly for livestreamers, NVENC is way better with text. But the point is that it happens far more frequently on X264. Check that out by pausing around this point in the video. It has some frames that look like the one on the right. Now, NVENC can also struggle with these kinds of rapid changes. In Rocket League, the playfield has a hexagonal containment grid that you can drive on. That’s especially noticeable when you get a lot of thin strips of detail moving quickly left or right or up and down. Likewise, the basketball court looks blurrier on X264, and so does the dark crowd. On the CPU, you can notice some ugly blotches. That’s close to the camera and at a distance. The CPU footage, however, has a soft and fuzzy look to it. This screenshot is from a quick turn where the camera is panning with a lot of speed. And NVENC is definitely better at dealing with a lot of on-screen changes at once. I picked Rocket League because it suffers from a lot of compression due to its intense pace. NVENC is better at handling rapid changesīut X264 falls behind when it comes to fast-moving gameplay. Again, the CPU maintains an image that is more in-line with the high-bitrate footage. You can also see that the white spotlight from the ceiling has some blocking around it for NVENC. At least when it comes to the smoothness of the light source. The CPU option, meanwhile, doesn’t look too different from the 160 Mbps H.265 4K encoder in the middle. You can see in the image below that the orange-yellow light on the bottom right of the image has some blocking for the GPU encoding. NVENC still seems to struggle with shifting from black to white. But I’ll include some screenshots below that show both encoders in action. To see the best possible comparison, you should watch the video at the top in 4K. I also included some HVEC H.265 4K footage recorded at 160Mbps. Everything else is default for OBS Studio. Both are also use the “High” profile and a keyframe interval of 2. X264 still does some things better, but I think NVENC may have the edge when it comes to what you want for livestreaming video.įor this text, I set NVENC and X264 to record at a bitrate of 6 Mbps. So how do these two encoding standards stack up against one another today? Overall, they’re pretty even. Three top investment pros open up about what it takes to get your video game funded.

Best encoder for live streaming