GPU NVENC for OBS

[dewman45]

Recently for work I've migrated our camera streams from WOWZA to OBS. We had been seeing some artifacting and crashes. OBS seemed to be working much better without any of the issues we were seeing, and I was already familiar with it. We were already running a Quadro P5000 that was doing pretty good until yesterday. Artifacting came back pretty hard. Thinking the GPU is at the end of it's life. We normally run 6-8 streams through OBS to YouTube. P5000 was really only getting close to 50% usage before it started having issues again. I am kind of working with what I have, so currently I have my own backup M2000 running. I have been debating an RTX 3050 for the better NVENC and to keep the same amount of VRAM. Would there be any issues trying to run the 3050 with this kind of load? It seems like the NVENC in the turing card should be better than the pascal card.

[ninbura]

You have a few things to consider

1. Nvidia's consumer-grade GPUs have an artificial 5 encode session limit and your driver will need to be patched to bypass that if you're encoding more than 5 unique streams concurrently.
2. The P5000 has dual encoders, you could run into encoder overload depending on your settings when running 8 concurrent 1080p streams on an Nvidia gpu that has a single encoder. Unless when you say "6-8 streams" you're referring to the sources in OBS, which renders encode session limits & encoder bandwidth irrelevant to the conversation. Use Nvidia's Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix for reference as to which GPUs have dual encoders.That being said... the M2000 only has 1 encoder, so if you're currently pulling off 8 concurrent streams with that you should be good. Unless you want to increase quality via presets or need more headroom in the future.
3. I'd consider using FFmpeg for your streams instead of OBS if you aren't compositing sources. FFmpeg is superior to OBS if you're directly streaming a source to a platform because it only hits the encoder on your GPU & not the 3D engine.
4. YouTube supports AV1 ingest, so with a 40-Series card you could greatly reduce your data rate as AV1 is much more efficient. Also, the 4070 TI and everything above it in the 40-Series has dual encoders, which is relevant if #2 is actually a problem for you.