NVME for Capturing / Encoding 1080p - 4K video

[TheWhiteRose000]

Alright,

 

Here is my question of the hour, is there any real world benefits to encoding, capturing, or recording to an NVME drive?

I know editing wise there are benefits as it lets you have almost perfect playback so you can ensure the overall quality of the video you're editing.

 

But I'm talking about capturing, encoding, ect like using OBS to capture footage and save it to the drive.

Can anyone run some tests, does it improve the CPU performance? Is there any system performance at all for a Streamer / YouTuber / Video editor?

 

 

[Juular]

13 minutes ago, TheWhiteRose000 said:

I know editing wise there are benefits as it lets you have almost perfect playback so you can ensure the overall quality of the video you're editing.

Wat.

No, there are no benefits of NVMe for virtually any consumer-level workloads, you would be bottlenecked by 500 MB\s (that would be 4 Gb\s bitrate of footage you're working with) read\write speeds of SATA SSDs only if you're reading and writing from\on the same drive, which usually isn't the case with proper video editing rig. But with good NVMe drive you can simultaneously read\write on the same drive just fine, that would be practically the only difference other than higher throughput of NVMe drives, in case you'll need to move\copy files faster, but that doesn't affect performance obviously. Another difference are heavy random read\write speeds but the difference between SATA and NVMe drives are rather small and again, there are almost no consumer level workloads that rely on primarily random access.

[Samfisher]

Don't see why it would improve CPU performance.  Your typical stream recording bitrate wouldn't even necessarily cause problems when recording to a HDD.  The only problems with recording a large file to HDD is the seek time to write to empty space.  A regular SATA SSD already has more than enough bandwidth, write speed and latency to never be an issue for stream quality recording.

[PRTI]

Would be pointless, it would not improve performance and regular SATA SSD's are more than capable to do that.

[TheWhiteRose000]

19 minutes ago, Samfisher said:

Don't see why it would improve CPU performance.  Your typical stream recording bitrate wouldn't even necessarily cause problems when recording to a HDD.  The only problems with recording a large file to HDD is the seek time to write to empty space.  A regular SATA SSD already has more than enough bandwidth, write speed and latency to never be an issue for stream quality recording.

You think just going through a regular SSD would be a better improvement than a HDD in this case?
I know for gaming NVME drives are a beast, but for capturing and encoding SSD > HDD?

[Samfisher]

2 minutes ago, TheWhiteRose000 said:

You think just going through a regular SSD would be a better improvement than a HDD in this case?
I know for gaming NVME drives are a beast, but for capturing and encoding SSD > HDD?

If all the HDD stores is your recordings then it wouldn't matter much, as I would assume all the files would be written in a nice sequential manner.  Even then at 6Mbps (the max Twitch allows for most, although you can get away with 8 ) even a HDD wouldn't cause issues.  Even for gaming, other than load times NVME drives don't offer that much to gamers.  Regular consumers like gamers will almost never use even 10% of an NVMEs capabilities fully besides transferring large files around which is only a small part of why NVMEs are great.

[TheWhiteRose000]

2 minutes ago, Samfisher said:

If all the HDD stores is your recordings then it wouldn't matter much, as I would assume all the files would be written in a nice sequential manner.  Even then at 6Mbps (the max Twitch allows for most, although you can get away with 8 ) even a HDD wouldn't cause issues.  Even for gaming, other than load times NVME drives don't offer that much to gamers.  Regular consumers like gamers will almost never use even 10% of an NVMEs capabilities fully besides transferring large files around which is only a small part of why NVMEs are great.

I'm using an Intel 660p for all my games, the performance boost I get from it is simply amazing, 0 load times ect.
But recording wise I'm trying for flawless 1080p and I generally try for a 20k bitrate, since I can't stream I focus mainly on the quality.
Large file sizes which I edit later.

Think it would be just better to have a large HDD or a Fast SSD in this case?

[WereCat]

You can easily saturate the speeds of NVMe if you try to capture lossless video as that usually is in the realm of 600k to 1M bitrate which means that not even the best SATA SSD could keep up. (You can actually do this with OBS). 

 

Other than that, it's similar story if you work with RAW or Prores formats when video editing. 

 

Not much for anything else. 

[Samfisher]

4 minutes ago, TheWhiteRose000 said:

I'm using an Intel 660p for all my games, the performance boost I get from it is simply amazing, 0 load times ect.
But recording wise I'm trying for flawless 1080p and I generally try for a 20k bitrate, since I can't stream I focus mainly on the quality.
Large file sizes which I edit later.

Think it would be just better to have a large HDD or a Fast SSD in this case?

So you record and stream at different bitrates?  That's a lot of CPU resources TBH.  Any reason you aren't just recording with ShadowPlay or something similar?

[Samfisher]

Just now, WereCat said:

You can easily saturate the speeds of NVMe if you try to capture lossless video as that usually is in the realm of 600k to 1M bitrate which means that not even the best SATA SSD could keep up. 

Other than that, it's similar story if you work with RAW or Prores formats when video editing. 

 

Not much for anything else. 

1M?  1M what?  Megabytes?  How would that saturate a 3GBPs NVME drive in any way?

[TheWhiteRose000]

Just now, Samfisher said:

So you record and stream at different bitrates?  That's a lot of CPU resources TBH.  Any reason you aren't just recording with ShadowPlay or something similar?

I don't stream my net is garbage with a 3mb upload.
So I focus on my strengths of editing high quality videos and uploading them later.
Streaming you have a cap which ultimately lowers the quality, recording at a higher bitrate yields a better quality video.

[Samfisher]

2 minutes ago, TheWhiteRose000 said:

I don't stream my net is garbage with a 3mb upload.
So I focus on my strengths of editing high quality videos and uploading them later.
Streaming you have a cap which ultimately lowers the quality, recording at a higher bitrate yields a better quality video.

Even then, recording x264 at 20MBps is a huge strain on your CPU.  In that situation even a slow SSD is miles ahead of a fast HDD.  It's latency that will cause problems for you.  Just a cheap SSD for recording before moving the files to the HDD for archiving.

[WereCat]

6 minutes ago, Samfisher said:

1M?  1M what?  Megabytes?  How would that saturate a 3GBPs NVME drive in any way?

Bitrate is a number of bits dedicated to video in a second.

Typically in Handbrake or OBS its in kbps and since OP mentioned OBS then I meant 1M kbps bitrate. 

 

[TheWhiteRose000]

1 minute ago, Samfisher said:

Even then, recording x264 at 20MBps is a huge strain on your CPU.  In that situation even a slow SSD is miles ahead of a fast HDD.  It's latency that will cause problems for you.  Just a cheap SSD for recording before moving the files to the HDD for archiving.

So in this case do you think a 1TB NVME drive would be a better choice over an SSD then archiving it in a large HDD afterwards?

[Samfisher]

2 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Bitrate is a number of bits dedicated to video in a second.

Typically in Handbrake or OBS its in kbps and since OP mentioned OBS then I meant 1M kbps bitrate. 

 

Wait, that 1M was 1 million?  1 million kilobits?  That's 125MB/s.

 

3 minutes ago, TheWhiteRose000 said:

So in this case do you think a 1TB NVME drive would be a better choice over an SSD then archiving it in a large HDD afterwards?

What sizes are your files typically?  1TB solely as a recording scratch disk seems like a lot haha.

[TheWhiteRose000]

Just now, Samfisher said:

Wait, that 1M was 1 million?  1 million kilobits?  That's 125MB/s.

 

What sizes are your files typically?  1TB solely as a recording scratch disk seems like a lot haha.

Generally the file sizes I deal with are anywheres between 50-200gbs after recording it really depends on how long I'm recording.

[WereCat]

3 minutes ago, Samfisher said:

Wait, that 1M was 1 million?  1 million kilobits?  That's 125MB/s.

 

What sizes are your files typically?  1TB solely as a recording scratch disk seems like a lot haha.

Yeah I was wrong it's Mbps not kbps. 

Look, you can try it for yourself in OBS. Just use one of the lossless presets in the simplified capture tab

[Samfisher]

12 minutes ago, TheWhiteRose000 said:

Generally the file sizes I deal with are anywheres between 50-200gbs after recording it really depends on how long I'm recording.

Then yeah 1TB sounds like a good purchase if it doesn't cost too much and if the cost isn't costing you elsewhere in other parts of your life

 

10 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Yeah I was wrong it's Mbps not kbps. 

Look, you can try it for yourself in OBS. Just use one of the lossless presets in the simplified capture tab

Unless the lossless recording is approaching 3GB/s I don't see how that saturates an NVME drive.  The warning when switching to lossless says upwards of 7GB per minute depending on resolution and refresh rate.  That's just 116.66MB a second.

[WereCat]

4 hours ago, Samfisher said:

Then yeah 1TB sounds like a good purchase if it doesn't cost too much and if the cost isn't costing you elsewhere in other parts of your life

 

Unless the lossless recording is approaching 3GB/s I don't see how that saturates an NVME drive.  The warning when switching to lossless says upwards of 7GB per minute depending on resolution and refresh rate.  That's just 116.66MB a second.

My bad. You're right.

I got around 150MB/s-200MB/s for QHD 60FPS recording when I tried it (faster than HDD though). At 4k it will definitely be more than that but still way bellow NVMe speeds. At 8k... maybe there you actually need NVMe as SATA SSD may not be enough.

[TheWhiteRose000]

15 hours ago, WereCat said:

My bad. You're right.

I got around 150MB/s-200MB/s for QHD 60FPS recording when I tried it (faster than HDD though). At 4k it will definitely be more than that but still way bellow NVMe speeds. At 8k... maybe there you actually need NVMe as SATA SSD may not be enough.

It retro-spec if I had just realized the type of memory card an 8K red camera takes, my answer would have been more obvious from the get go.