Almost three years have passed since I did my original full hardware encoder showdown, and the field has changed drastically since then. NVIDIA brought out the Turing and Ampere architecture, AMD finally designed a useful GPU architecture, and even Intel is entering the market now. Finally no longer a Red vs Green battle, but a Red vs Green vs Blue - the full RGB experience! But also due to that, my data is now well beyond outdated, and its time to refresh. Unfortunately for me, sourcing hardware for testing purposes right now is near impossible at reasonable prices, so I...
With the release of NVIDIA Maxine, a number of exciting new Video, Audio and AR effects were shown. I wanted to try these out much earlier, but an unexpected problem prevented me from doing so. However thanks to NVIDIAs help, I've managed to get some of the examples running most of the time. Please note that the effect I'm testing is still considered Beta by NVIDIA, so final quality will likely differ from what I show here.
It’s been a day since the reveal of FidelityFX Super Resolution, and it appears to be a DLSS killer. But on closer inspection, it seems that AMD made a mistake in at least one of the examples, and forgot to show the FSR footage, instead only showing the native footage. Let’s go into the details on AMDs FidelityFX Super Resolution a bit. A mistake in the Presentation If you watched the AMD presentation only once, you would most likely not have spotted this – I’ve even had to watch it three times to spot it. There’s three demos in the...
While testing new updates to the VES testing suite, I discovered some weird behavior in NVENC. Here's a list of them, maybe NVIDIA can shed some light on it:
Melted PCB Around the end of last week, my Alphacool waterblock decided that it was time to kill the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition it was placed on. That was the day I learned that burning PCB and plastic smells the same as coal - and that I should probably replace my smoke detectors since they didn't go off at all. That meant I needed a new GPU, and after a bit of search for actually available GPUs, I ended up going for the 3090 cards - nobody apparently has 3080s, only 3070s and 3090s. The card I ended...
NVIDIA certainly wasn't idle in the last two years, that much is clear. Their jump from 12nm to 8nm should set the average standard for what we should expect from moving nodes while also improving on the generation. This generational leap is what we should have seen from the 20xx series, which now seems like overpriced junk - so sorry for anyone who bought them in the last 6 months and can't return them. Let's go into a bit of history and detail. The AMD side: Shrinking 14nm to 7nm Three years ago in 2017, AMD RTG tried to even...
Streaming with more than one PC has been the leader in H.264 encoding for years, but NVIDIAs Turing and Ampere generation has put a significant dent into that lead. The new generation of GPUs with the brand new encoder brought comparable quality x264 medium - if you can find a GPU that is. Let's take a look at what's needed to set up your stream for massively improved quality.
If you haven't heard of RTX Voice, it's basically "Krisp" in Discord but with less shitty audio quality. It's based on Tensor, which can fall back onto CUDA hardware, but runs best on RTX due to the hardware accelerated Tensor cores on it. You can find a guide on how to set it up here on Nvidias own website.
