Our GPUs are Better for Streamers, Nvidia Claims
The AV1 video codec is growing in popularity, thanks mainly to its free license. Nvidia, on the other hand, claims that its latest-generation GeForce GPUssupport it better, providing higher video quality.
The open source AV1 codec is gaining popularity (especially among streamers), successfully competing with the licensed H264 and H265. In principle, it is supported by all modern GPUs, but Nvidia claims that GeForce chips do it better.
Nvidia supports AV1 better
"Designed to meet the requirements of professional content creators, NVENC maintains video quality with greater accuracy than competing encoders. GeForce RTX users can stream higher quality video at the same bitrate as competing products, or encode at a lower bitrate while maintaining similar video quality," claims Nvidia.
This information from Nvidia coincided with the release of a new version of OBS (29.1). As was the case in early (beta) releases, the new software supports AV1, used by, for example, YouTube streaming. Nvidia believes that the NVENC codec present in the RTX 40 family is more efficient and produces better quality streaming video at similar clock rates than on Intel and AMD cards.
Comparison of AV1 encoding quality according to Nvidia.Source: Nvidia
To show the difference in quality, Nvidia attached several screenshots, like the one above, to the published news. They show that the image encoded on the GeForce card has fewer artifacts, characteristic of lossy compression. However, it's worth remembering that AMD offers dedicated accelerators for streamers, such as Alveo MA35D. Chips specialized for this particular task can prove to be much more efficient in terms of power consumption. Do you agree with Nvidia's opinion that their chips perform better during streaming?
