PSA - Not all Nvidia 40-series GPUs are equal when it comes to video encoding

[ninbura]

Nvidia just announced their RTX 4070, and with it its specs on their official site. Most notably, for the first time since 10-Series; like-series GPUs don't always have the same number of encoders.

The RTX 4070 and below (laptop chips) have a single 8th generation encoder, while the RTX 4070 TI and up have 2 8th generation encoders:


For most people this shouldn't matter, but if you're trying to encode more than two 4K streams or more than one 8K stream in real-time the RTX 4070 and below won't be able to handle it. For example, if you're streaming 4K to YouTube, recording 4K locally, and stream 4k to Discord (AV1) simultaneously, you'll overload the encoder. This may also be relevant for Plex users who are streaming high resolution content to multiple clients.

To be clear this doesn't affect the quality of your encodes, you simply have less encoding bandwidth to play with. They haven't updated it to show the RTX 4070 yet, but Nvidia's Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix is useful when comparing GPUs encoding / decoding potential.

[emosun]

2 minutes ago, ninbura said:

if you're streaming 4K to YouTube, recording 4K locally, and streaming 4k to Discord (AV1), you'll overload the encoder.

on a laptop.....

[ninbura]

5 minutes ago, emosun said:

on a laptop.....

This also applies to the RTX 4070 desktop chip, which will be a tempting GPU for a streaming PC due to its price point.

If your target stream resolution is 4K+, go with the 4070 TI.

[porina]

Curious. All 30 series seems to only have a single encoder too. If you didn't have a problem with 30 series or older, 4070 isn't going to be different. Only 4070Ti and higher offer more than that.

[ninbura]

Worth noting that with some ingenuity you could probably get a 4K setup working, like by sharing the same encode session for streaming and recording.

But if there's any reason you're encoding more than 2 streams of 4K60 I would recommenced getting one of the cards with dual encoders.