GPU for realtime encoding

[Napalm360]

Hey there, first of all i apologise if this is incorrect subforum, was realted to gpus so i pciekd this.

 

Im looking at a secondary Gpu thats cheap like a 660 for example to use for live streams and encode in real-time.

 

Didn't know  where to look but i believe nvidia cards are good?

 

cheers and ill be sleeping after this so ill reply tommorow

[WereCatf]

With regards to NVIDIA H/W-encoding, ie. NVENC, newer is better. I have used NVENC quite a lot and I did play around with it already back when I had a GTX660, and I would say that you totally should get at least a Maxwell GPU, because the jump up in image-quality is quite large. Then again, you might find a used GTX 1050 quite cheaply. (Don't look at GT 1030, it's a multimedia-card and doesn't have NVENC, only NVDEC)

[mariushm]

Any Polaris card  (RX 460 and up, RX 550 and higher) will have hardware h264 and hevc encoder.  h264 can be done at 4K 60 fps and HEVC can be done for sure at 4k 30 fps, possibly more. The lower end ones I'm not sure they can do full HEVC 4K at 60fps, but for example they may be able to handle some 21:9 format like 3440x1440 at 50fps or 60fps

You can use OBS with AMF (AMD Advanced Media Framework ) to encode.

 

nvidia have slightly more powerful decoders, i don't know about encoders, but anything equal or better than GT 1050 should support hardware encoding , at least h264 1080p 60fps. 4K 60 fps should be doable. 

I haven't tested it personally but I heard GT 1030 has no hardware encoding support, so don't buy one of those hoping you can use it to encode with the card.

[Napalm360]

Lol 1030s stuck, thanks for the input, Mainly wondering about 1080p60 and would a Maxwell/Pascal quadro be fine or are the gaming cards faster/cheaper