Multiple GPU encoding/streaming/recording

[Patrick P.]

Hello LTT Community!

 

So I am a little lost trying to find information on using multiple gpus.

First let me explain my problem:

While streaming graphically intensive games like COD or sometimes even apex legends, my obs will sometimes crash and say Error encoding.

I never get this when streaming Rocket League or anything else. I haven't been recording my streams with obs because i already have problems.

Also, it should be noted that obs encoder error comes up inconsistently. Sometimes after 15 minutes, sometimes later.

 

What I want to accomplish:

I would like to be able to Game, stream and record those streams with obs at the same time with one pc.

 

Now a couple questions:

1.Can I install another Gpu from the same family, without problems? Ex: RTX2070 and rtx2060?

2.If yes, will dedicating the 2060 to encoding my stream in obs, alleviate some of the load from my primary 2070?

3.If 2 gpus were installed, would that help in video editing programs?

 

Current Setup:

Threadripper 2950x

Rtx2070

Obs currently set to use nvenc encoder for streaming, 720 output.

Game Settings for Cod WERE lowered to see if it had an affect, unknown if it really made a difference as it still gave me encoder error occasionally.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. A lot of the videos and information I've found has been dated and conflicting. Some say I can't accomplish what I'm trying to do and are from 2017, some videos say I can.

Thanks, Guys and Gals!

[WereCat]

Don't use dedicated card for OBS... it will be way worse than just using your main card because the encoding with NVENC happens right on the GPU so it has very low latency and barely any performance penalty. 

 

Yes, you can use dedicated card for that but then the data has to pass from your main GPU to RAM then to the dedicated GPU and you will have higher latency and higher performance penalty. 

 

Your encoding errors may happen for variety of reasons. 

Do you run the newest version of OBS Studio and graphics drivers? 

 

Why do you even bother to use NVENC when you can use your 2950X with CPU x264 for even better quality at the same bitrates? 

 

Can you show me all of your OBS settings? (screenshot) 

[Mick Naughty]

I know other people here recently said they did that. 

Installed the other card and selected it as the encoder and supposedly works. 

 

I was gonna do that but didn’t seem to work well at the time. Just used a spare pc instead. 

 

You have a fancy cpu, can’t you encode with that? Should have plenty of power to spare according to the internet. 

[mariushm]

I'll also repeat it. You'll get much better quality using x264 software encoder. At 720p, the x264 encoder will probably use at most 4-6 cores out of the 32 (64 threads) you have. 

The games probably don't even use more than 16 cores so you probably have cpu cores doing nothing anyway.

 

Configure OBS correctly ... NV12 , bt709 color format, Full (PC) range (make sure the video card also outputs RGB or YCbCr 4:4:4 Full (not studio/limited)

Capture at the native resolution of your monitor, if you're playing at 2560x1440 you can use bilinear resize to resize to 1280x720 (because resizing to exactly 50% causes no quality loss no matter what algorithm you use), otherwise use bicubic resize (lanczos if available is a tiny bit better but pointless for streaming)