X264 Image Quality Analysis: SLOW is NOT worth it (GN Follow-Up)

I personally do stream at x264 fast 936p 8000bitrate on trovo and looks better than AMD avc, 936p looks better with 8000bitrate than 1080p

So 10mbs fast/medium? ❤

I just got an Intel rig and have the 13700k. I streamed with quick sync and I get most of my fps In game back from my 3070 ti on pubg but the quality drop off was garbage. I’m using very fast. Should I use medium? I’m streaming at 7k bitrate with a gigabit connection. 1080p 60fps.

I got a 3950x specifically to maximize quality at a low bitrate while streaming. As even NVENC didn't look that good to me at 6kbps at the time of my decision. Preset=Slow is fine and smooth. If you adjust down the frame rate, you might get it to work at "preset=slower" .

i have amd 6700xt and 6000 and 8000kpbs my quality is bad on twitch obs h264 and 10700kf normal quality and normal profil hight 6000kbs and slow have lag in stream i have singel pc gaming+streaming

If you can afford x264 actually matters. Games like witcher 3, or any game with heavy vegetations, mesh details will suck at nvenc even at 8000 kbit... The whole image gets blocky. This guy always cherry picks scenarios where nvenc excels. Sure in games in scenes where its in doors without much detail nvenc looks even better than x264. But when you encounter fine details the quality goes to faster x264 blockyiness maybe even worse. X264 slow is very consistent. 5700g can handle it with enhanced flags at 60fps 936p without a single frame loss. Consistently.. So we have the hardware now. More cores is worse for x264. More threads and quality goes shit like h264/nvenc. So your 8P+8E core shintel cpu won't do a better job than 8 core massive IPC amd 5700/x/g or 5800x.. Less cores better quality.

I can understand streams running 8000 kbit using nvenc or x264 easily ;)
Tho i have to admit, if you want 720p60hz nvenc is worth it. But anything beyond 720p your quality dips

Do a witcher 3 analysis. Or a game with a scene where the carpet has mesh patterns. Nvenc sucks in those areas and so many games has heavy vegetations since 2013..

My iPad Air 3 might be limiting me here, but in my honest opinion, between Slow, Medium and Fast the quality seems about on par with each other, I barely even notice any blocking though if someone can point out where blocking should be more apparent I am willing to go to that point, pause the video and start playing Mr. Focusing Observant.

As is, I would nonetheless like to note I am apparently easily fooled into wanting to chase the best, for an example, many say buying a 16 core cpu and playing Call Of Duty: Black Ops 3 is not going to net you more FPS over what a 6 core could do, but I look at benchmarks between the two, see maybe a 5 fps increase going from 6 to 16 cores and I'm just like "Right, the 16 core is CLEARLY better because I get 5 extra fps, which makes the 6 core look quite pathetic", same with the x264 CPU preset, everyone keeps saying the slower presets are better for quality so natually I go pursuing slower x264 presets over the faster ones.

In that case and with that said, one individual can be blamed and so can a select group of people and that is the select group takes blame for making a misleading and not 100% accurate statement or if they did, they failed to note the context in which tehey make their statement and me because I believed that groups statement, yes I am self-roasting so the repliers don't have to.

BUT, that all said, I did do my own testing with the very limited tech I have which is not much, and sufficent to say I checked exactly how many cores each preset uses, and from my understanding, given my 6 core started to struggle on x264 Medium, it is sufficent to say, x264 Fast seems to use 4 cores, x264 Medium uses 6 cors and x264 Slow must use 8 cores.

To be made clear, I am only guessing with how many cores x264 Medium and Slow use so take what I'm saying with an atom sized grain of sodium, I personally would love to know how many cores x264 slow actually uses during livestreaming but I have not been lucky enough to find that information anywhere on the net.

Whooo, that was a metaphorical mouthful, If anyone wants to reply to this comment, I am open to conversate.

Ryzen 2600/2600X/3600 custom x264 settings for you guys: 720p60fps bicubic, 6k bitrate 3k custom buffer size. Custom settings: level=4.2 cabac=1 8x8dct=1 partitions=i8x8,i4x4,p8x8,p4x4,b8x8,b4x4 ref=4 bframes=2 b-adapt=2 fast-pskip=0 rc-lookahead=30 sync-lookahead=30 me=hex merange=16 subme=6 deblock=-3:2:0 direct=auto aq-mode=3 trellis=0 deadzone-inter=11 deadzone-intra=11 psy-rd=0.15:0.0 weightp=2

what a great video... thank you

you can solve the blocking problems by using deblocking in x264 and try rise that ref=6 me=uhm deblock -3 +3 qpmax=30 rc_lookahead=120 bframes=8 chroma_qp_offset=2 ( now try preset Medium, Slow, fast )

6700xt + i7 10700kf medium or fast ? slow have lag

Thanks for the Video it still helped me alot.
But I have until now 1 question, when I have now 24 threads, should I use 12? or can I go up 3 Threads to 15? Like u do?
Ryzen 5900X for anybody thanks for the answers!

It really isn't worth it.
Everything past medium looks worse.

Great video. watched it from start to finish. finally some clarity about all this encoder stuff.

Serious facts here!! It is a world we live in today that the truth will always be hit with miss leading info for marketing, product sale and it is up to us that trust you, watch you for these true facts to keeping going with proper info, there is still a lot of us that want to learn or learn this info from the amount of testing you provide. Thanks again for such detail of info.

I also have it the same problem, about search and clarify mi ideas respect to a problem, its cool right?, in my opinion is what do you like to do and your passion, learn to do o explain by yourself.
i like your content and the way you explain and expose the problem.
im start in my own channel on spanish but more gameplays, im interesting about this problem with OBS, and what to do, if use my 3700x or my 2080, that was clear for my with your video.
thanks.
this is my first coment full in english without translate (sorry for my bad redaction), im practice.

Your game video has tearing. You should avoid that. That looks not good and also worsens encoding

Great video! Thx for all the info, I have one big question thou! Does anyone know if I should do very fast with 6500 bitrate or faster with 4000 bit?!

Bicubic vs Lanczos? I stream 864p 60fps 6k bitrate with the n264 since I run a HD60s capture card.

x264 blah blah blah exciting ....... tell me more about that floating pop filter . . . ......

man im watching this now... and i cannot decide if i should use x264 or Nvenc im trying to find your secret sauce settings cause i need that in my life

Bro can u tell me best graphics card for church live stream
How much vram required

does 4k60 mk2 support 4 4 4 ?

Some dude talking about some streaming video compression setting I wasn't planning on using not being worth it for half an hour... 👌

Random question. I have a 2700x which I’m currently building for a streaming pc only. I have a 5800x @ 4.8ghz in my main pc. I was planning to transcode using 2700x with x264 will it bottleneck?

If you have limits to stream bitrate, when slow worth it. If you have 10k+ bitrate than no.

So for streaming Warzone even with a 5800x processor, downscaled from 1440p 144hz, I should be doing nvenc (new) instead of x264 (medium) and 720p 60 FPS instead of 1080p 60 FPS? I’ve been having problem with the streams on my page being blocky as can be seen in the VODs on my page. My card is still a 1070 however, it’s just impossible to find a 3000 series card right now.

What about if you have a dedicated streaming PC for streaming?

You are heaven sent thank you sir & God lol

I am watching it and its nearly 2 years since launch haha :p

I have a serious question.

What CPU would you recommend for x264 encoding?

You may ask what my purpose is.

I have amassed a large number of ( purchased! ) DVDs over the years and would like to have a digital library on an external HDD.

They are of PAL colour system ( if that helps ).

You may ask... why am I asking?

Well, I was originally thinking of purchasing the 10900 ( non K variant ) as I thought that the more cores and threads, the better

But I realise that maybe the 11th generation with fewer cores, threads is a better choice.

Finally my " logic " behind purchasing a NON K variant is that it has a lower TDP so I guess it would draw fewer watts during Handbrake and keep my temps around 85 degrees Celsius

Thank you very much in advance for reading this huge comment !!!

You sir are the BOSS! long time watcher and blown away with the level of detail you go into to help us all improve our streams... I just want to say THANK YOU. You are very much apprecaited.

This is the sexiest thing I've seen all day. I can't stop my glasses from fogging up.

great video

Watched the whole thing and yeah I think I will stick to fast with my cheap r7 1800x

Naturally, the blocking would not be any lesser on slow compared to medium. After all, the bitrate is simply too low to get rid of it. 1080p60 Think about the bitrates usually found for streaming movie content. And mind you , we’re talking about 1080p24 content. The framerate directly impacts the bitrate needed for the same quality. I’d say 12 Mbit is the bare minimum to have at least a chance on getting away with no visible blocking.

If slow is pointless and nvenc is akin to medium, why do people not use budget streambox's with a 1660 card and trash for everything else? might take another 50watts power i guess?

Hey Epos,I cant find the "secret sauce" settings. I want to start streaming 720p60fps but im struggling to find the details on what to use. I want to use x264 as I have the ryzen 2700x but at what bitrate,6000 ? I have a 1440p monitor so downscaling to 720p would be better and cleaner over 900p ?

Hey, would you say one should stream with a 3900X (x264, slow/medium, 8000kbps) or NVENC?
Especially considering fast motion

I got a 5900x+5700xt and i got a dramatic qualitiy diffrent between fast and medium and slow...how is this possible after your explanation? I´m streaming at 5000k, 720p@50 fps. Is it because my graphiccard is too weak or what is going on?

Does limit cpu core from 8 to 4 or 2 with 8 thread or 4 thread can make difference on OBS x264 CPU encoding while stream
Means 4 core 8 threads for game and 4 core 8 thread for OBS?

yararlı

Is it just me or does the NVENC footage look ever-so-slightly stuttery compared to the x264 footage throughout this? I've noticed similar on my own recordings and could never quite work out why it looked slightly off...