Blog

Oct 14, 2023

NVIDIA claims to have better AV1 encoder than AMD and Intel

Yesterday the stable version of OBS Studio 29.1 was released. Just like the

Yesterday the stable version of OBS Studio 29.1 was released. Just like the betas, this version supports AV1 encoding for YouTube streaming. NVIDIA took this opportunity to discuss its superiority in AV1 encoding compared to competitors.

The AV1 is an open-source codec from Alliance for Open Media. In over two years, this video codec has emerged as a true alternative to H264 and H265/HEVC which are not open source. The royalty-free format will be a big factor in making AV1 the future of video streaming, and all major GPU brands are now on board and actively developing GPUs with support for this video format.

As we know, AV1 encoding is now supported by all modern GPUs architectures: GeForce RTX 40 (Ada), Radeon RX 7000 (RDNA3) and Arc Alchemist (Xe-HPG). However, the implementations vary and encoding capabilities may show noticeable differences.

Designed to support the rigors of professional content creators, NVENC preserves video quality with a higher accuracy than competitive encoders. GeForce RTX users can stream higher-quality images at the same bitrate as competitive products or encode at a lower bitrate while maintaining a similar picture quality.

— NVIDIA

NVIDIA has released a still from a video comparison featuring AMD RX 7900 XTX, Arc A770 and its RTX 4080 GPUs in AV1 4K and 12 Mbps encoding comparison. The company claims that their encoder produces higher quality images with the same bitrate:

Comparison of AV1 4K encoding, Source: NVIDIA

NVIDIA RTX 40 GPUs rely on the 8th Gen NVENC encoder, which enables up to 8K60 (FPS) encoding by splitting the frames into horizontal lanes on some GPUs. At 4K, it can provide similar video quality at 10 Mbps compared to H.264 stream at 20 Mbps, but overall NVIDIA claims AV1 encoding provides around 40% better encoding efficiency.

The OBS Studio 29.1 is now available for download from official website. The project is sponsored by both NVIDIA and AMD.

Source: NVIDIA