**Understanding NVINK and its Impact on OBS Streaming Quality**

When it comes to achieving high-quality video streaming with OBS (Open Broadcasting Software), one of the most important factors to consider is the encoder settings. Specifically, the use of NVINK (New NVIDIA Ink) has been gaining attention in recent times, particularly among gamers and streamers who demand crisp and sharp visuals. In this article, we'll delve into the world of NVINK and explore its benefits, limitations, and best practices for achieving optimal streaming quality.

**Recommended Settings for Fast-Paced Games**

For fast-paced games, it's recommended to turn on psycho visual tuning and leave max B frames at 2. This setting is ideal for capturing smooth and responsive gameplay footage. On the other hand, for slower-paced games or recordings, using a lower B frame setting (e.g., 1 or 0) can help achieve better image quality. When it comes to high-bitrate recordings, turning on look ahead and leaving max B frames at 4 or setting it to 4 can be beneficial in reducing pixelation.

**Testing NVINK with Different Encoder Settings**

To get a better understanding of NVINK's capabilities, I conducted an experiment using the UT Video Lossless Encoding tool. I recorded a game of Apex Legends using a capture card and OBS on a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (20 Series) GPU. The recording was then played back through OBS with different encoder settings, including: (1) New NVINK with recommended settings, (2) New NVINK with Look Ahead off and 2 B frames, (3) Old NVINK with recommended settings, (4) X264 Fast, and (5) Quick Sync. Unfortunately, the Quick Sync driver in OBS crashed during testing, rendering it unusable for comparison.

**Comparing NVINK to Other Encoders**

In comparing New NVINK to Old NVINK, I noticed that the new encoder exhibited less pixelation and macro blocking, particularly when using 4 B frames. However, this came at the cost of slightly sharper images in some cases. When compared to X264 Fast, I found that NVINK produced cleaner-looking footage with reduced jagged edges, while X264 Fast prioritized detail over crispness.

**Recommended Recording Settings**

For optimal recording settings, it's recommended to use NVIDIA's VBR (Variable Bitrate) settings with a max bitrate of 60 Mbps. With this setting, you can achieve high-quality recordings while maintaining a reasonable file size. Additionally, ensuring that the recording is set to 2K resolution and using 2-keyframe intervals still will help maintain consistency in the footage.

**Limitations and Future Developments**

While NVINK has shown promise in achieving better streaming quality, it's essential to note that its capabilities are not yet fully understood. The encoder's algorithm is constantly evolving, and new updates may introduce additional features or improvements. As for AMD GPU encoding and IGPU Quick Sync support, while theoretically possible, it's uncertain when these will be implemented.

**Conclusion**

NVINK has the potential to revolutionize OBS streaming quality by providing a more efficient and effective way of capturing crisp visuals. By understanding its capabilities and limitations, streamers can optimize their encoder settings for specific use cases. As the technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see further improvements and refinements in NVINK's performance.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's better what's the pros and cons what's the difference what is all this about i've received so many questions that i decided to make a dedicated video about this even though i will actually be using an excerpt from my obs version 23 update video where i did a breakdown of it but i left out a couple details by accident i spent a long time trying to make sure everything was in there but naturally something's always overlooked so i'm going to add in those extra details and show some more quality comparisons and do a little bit more of a deep dive i'm eposvox here to make tech easier and more fun and to summarize in a nutshell obs has updated the way that they use the nvidia nv ink encoder within their software in the upcoming version 23 update and i have a full explanation from the excerpt that i will play in a minute for you but they have reworked it to be better performing and give you more direct control over the encoder that you didn't have access to before which is pretty cool and kind of a big deal and eventually will benefit all gpus in terms of performance but there's some confusion regarding whether it benefits quality and things like that and as i will say in the clip the quality benefits come specifically from rtx 20 series touring graphics cards they have a bigger newer nv ink chip that is responsible for the quality increase that being said you could theoretically squeeze more quality out of your live stream especially if you're on an older card with these new settings but the settings themselves do not directly affect quality and i do want to discuss some of the actual hardware changes in a moment so the new envy inc settings and options and capabilities within obs studio do work with all nv ink capable graphics cards specifically from 700 series and newer you can you know you can sort of run them on the 600 series but i'm told that there's some issues with that and generally it's not recommended and so i'm not sure but obs may actually disable it for those cards at which point you would not be able to however it is validated as working as intended and you know benefiting on 700 series and video graphics cards and newer so you can use it on all graphics cards not just the new rtx cards so that's a big thing that i left out on my other video and this update does not address the gpu allocation bug where if you have a game using up most of your gpu and it's in focus obs is performance degrades i released a kind of ranty faq video about this and people thought the new envy inc might address it it can help it can help with it by reducing the gpu load by being more efficient but it is not a direct addressing of that or fix for that in the slightest so don't think that as far as quality goes of nv ink itself i did want to add and say at some point in a video the gtx 1060 through the 1080 ti for the most part has the same quality and capability of envy inc across all of those cards it's weaker on the 1050 ti and lower and it's lower quality and performing on older graphics cards each generation but the 1060 through the 1080 ti for normal game streaming uses has the same quality the 2060 through the 2080 ti for now also have the same quality between them so the 2060 will have the same envy ink as the 2080 ti and every card in between that could change in the future nvidia is always trying to come up with more features to utilize you know the extra cores and tensor cores and things like that on the cards so you may see some that benefit the newer car you know the higher end cards better than the lower end cards but in terms of raw encoding speed they are actually exactly the same if you actually look at nvidia's reference matrix uh with regards to envy inc and what the cards support and things like that you will notice that the 1080 and 1080 ti actually have two chips for envying and so for higher level applications where you're running multiple nvme streams at once back and forth you can actually get more out of it due to the extra nv capabilities on the 1080 ti but for normal obs use for most obs use at all and video rendering in like normal programs you know unless you have some complex way of accessing both streams it's still the same as the 1060 and things like that but they did decrease that back to one for even the 2080 ti and the 2080 for all the 20 series they found that they couldn't get the quality and performance they needed out of the dual chip layout and so they reduced it back to one and simply made it bigger there's now more silicon dedicated to envy inc on those cards but again this is just a hardware change this is just for how this affects the turing cards in terms of the actual obs update there's a little bit of a difference and i'm going to go on and play the clip from my obs update video because i do a really good job that i fact checked with multiple people of explaining the differences let's play that the next major change in this update is what's been commonly referred to as the new envy inc and again i want to do a little bit of myth busting here the actual quality improvements of nv inc on nvidia's new rtx 20 series turing graphics cards is primarily a hardware change there is a physical envy ink chip on the card that has been altered and improved to increase quality this applies to any use of the nv ink encoder with these cards in any program old obs updated obs video editing software anything the new nv ink settings in this obs update can help you squeeze a little bit more quality out of your stream by means of giving you more control but it's not a direct quality improvement that's not what the point of it is it is actually a hardware improvement on those 20 series cards i'm recording a video and i got a kitty climbing all over me say hello not to me to them hello i am stream kitty also this new encoding pipeline does not work on windows 7. obs will fall back to the old methods that i explain in a moment on windows 7. this should however work on windows 8.1 and obviously windows 10. this new envy inc is a complete rework of how obs interacts with the gpu for gpu-based encoding in previous versions of obs it was designed to to handle only raw video frames in system memory or ram the frames had to be copied from the gpu's vram to ram and then sent off to the encoder which at the time was predominantly x264 that ran on your cpu so that design made sense at the time and sending it from gpu to ram to cpu for encoding however because of this design that meant that when using gpu encoding like envy inc it would have to copy frames from vram to ram and then be sent off to envy inc which then would be copied back from ram to vram again resulting in an unnecessary round trip due to that video pipeline design this uses up more resources and bandwidth than is necessary and adds a little bit of latency in the latest version of obs there's now an additional discrete video pipeline for gpu encoders that can take a texture directly without moving any raw frames out of vram this eliminates the unnecessary vram to ram to vram round trip thus maximizing the potential performance of hardware encoders such as envy inc and reducing the impact that it might have on the games that you're running while streaming or recording on higher end systems where things were already running smoothly you may not notice any difference but in some side-by-side comparisons you could see as much as 5-10 frames per second or even more in some weird scenarios maybe increase in-game and that scales as hardware gets worse along with this update came more direct access to the envy inc tools and some new quality controls they're named a little silly but they let you do some cool stuff if you're in the obs advanced output mode two pass encoding is now no longer a direct option but it is automatically part of the max quality preset this determines how much load is put on the envy ink encoder to get the most quality most people can just use max quality and be fine but if you're getting encoder overloaded errors lower it to quality to see if that improves generally speaking profiles should always be set to high for these kinds of streaming purposes it tunes the encoder in a way that just needs to be set to that look ahead and psycho visual tuning are new options lookahead allows the encoder to dynamically change the amount of b frames between 0 and the max number that you input at the bottom of the ui where it says max b frames these are frames used to get the most quality out of your footage they're kind of like reference frames at full quality but they require a lot of bandwidth so on high motion content you don't always want a ton of those as they can reduce quality without enough bitrate assigned to your stream lookahead helps save you some trouble by automatically determining how much to use based on the frames or based on your content psycho visual tuning improves image quality on moving footage by enabling the rate distortion optimization which is just a setting within the encoder itself that affects high motion footage for high motion content shooters action games things like that set max b frames to two for low motion content such as card games or desktop capture things like that you can increase this to four however if you do see pixelization on stream consider reducing this back to two keyframe interval needs to be set for two as for streaming on twitch and youtube as always and set your max bit rate according to your streaming service and upload speed as usual i have a whole video on this in the description if you're interested also you do still technically have the option of offloading encoding onto a second gpu here but that will cause obs to fall back to the old nv inc implementation since you can't share this information between gpus directly either way keep in mind that this is generally a bad idea despite how many people have been suggesting it with my recent videos and does not address that gpu utilization issue that i talked about in my recent kind of ranty it was more like a faq video than anything you see obs itself still needs the render and composite on the gpu that your game or display is running on and that's where the bulk of obs gpu usage and impact comes from encoding is very efficient and it's on its own chip on the gpu so offloading that not only does not help your performance but it more or less negates any of this updated framework's benefits if you were able to do it within the new envy inc anyway it's also worth noting that within the new nv inc i am saying that wrong now you will be unable to apply rescaling during output if you want a different output resolution than your canvas you'll have to apply it universally in the video settings tab sucks but it's worth the trade-off if you do enable rescale output in the encoder settings for envy inc the obs will fall back to using the old env again the cool thing here is that theoretically this rework can be applied to all gpus in the future currently the only iteration is for nvidia cards and i can't even begin to speculate when amd or intel support will be added but the work done here can benefit everyone in the end it is worth noting here that there's a little bit of weirdness with the look ahead and psycho visual tuning features on rtx cards 20 series touring cards these use both the envy ink hardware and the cuda hardware the normal cuda hardware to really run them super hardcore and get much better results out of them whereas on older graphics cards it just uses cuda and so this combination of envy inc plus cuda usage is kind of running into that gpu allocation issue that i've mentioned which is on older cards you're actually demanding more of the gpu significantly more of the gpu using this recording or rendering method recording method encoding method that's the word i'm looking for than normal and then it is actually taking from rtx cards so worth noting there something i did want to add to that clip the rdo the rate distortion optimization that is enabled through the cycle visual tuning this is something typically reserved for x264 medium preset which is part of why it's so high quality and sort of an x264 fast which is why the cycle visual tuning upgrade is something that kind of gives it its edge and is actually a lot better on the touring graphics cards even though you can enable it on the older ones the only real disadvantage i had some people asking like pros and cons between the new and old envy ink for the most part you should always be using the new one because it's going to perform better and run better and do everything better but the only real disadvantage to the new envy inc is that inability to check the rescale output box on the encoder now it's always been more efficient to do this in the video tab because it does it on the actual gpu render load which does the scaling and it can do that really efficiently and doesn't take up much resources and is generally the best way to go but if you want to be able to stream and record at different resolutions you can't really do that here unless you're using x264 for your streaming and new envy ink for recording that way you only rescale during the x264 encode so that also means that if you have your scaled resolution set in the video tab like i recommended if you use the replay buffer it will be recording that in the quality of or in the resolution of that scaled resolution set in your video tap so you would be unable to get native resolution you know full 1080p or whatever replay buffer if you have it set scaled to 720p or 864 or 900p or whatever i think it's worth the trade-off for the extra performance benefit and honestly if you're throwing enough bitrate at your recordings especially if it's a replay buffer like your recordings aren't going to be that long in the first place throw a high enough crf value like a 12 or a 14 at it or a high enough bitrate and something like that doesn't really matter in my opinion because you can still scale it back up and mostly maintain quality in terms of recommended settings nvidia's recommended settings for fast paced games action games shooters things like that is to set it to cbr of course because you have to for streaming but then full max bit rate of 6k or 8k depending on if you want to push twitch past its recommended limits i stick with 6k for all of my testing and samples here keyframe interval 2 seconds is required but then preset is max quality which enables 2-pass encoding and it's just going to be the best profile set to high of course and then turn look ahead off and turn on psycho visual tuning and then leave max b frames at 2. this is recommended for fast paced games for slower paced games it's or for recordings if you're doing recordings at high bit rate it's recommended to turn on look ahead and leave max b frames at 4 or set it to 4 rather this can be extended during recording because you have enough bandwidth in your bitrate to have those bigger b frames and not get pixelization whereas during live streaming you don't have enough in your small live streaming bitrate to have multiple b frames back to back to back eating up bandwidth and i have a full explanation in that previous clip that kind of explains what they are four can look better i'm showing i have some i've recorded some tests here i took a lossless recording using the ut video lossless encoding that i showed off in a previous video of my of a game of apex legends captured by a capture card at full rgb so as close to lossless as i could get it recorded it in youtube video and then ran that as a media source through obs on a 20 series card a 2080 at a few different settings i did the new nv ink at the recommended settings of look ahead off and two b frames and then through the slower preset of look ahead on and four 4b frames and then i ran it through old old nv ink and i ran it through x264 fast and i tried running it through quick sync but apparently there's some issue with quick sync drivers in obs right now that just caused it to crash so i couldn't test that right now that sucks but you can actually turn on of course four b frames and look ahead for fast-paced action games and in some scenarios it's gonna look better but in many other scenarios it's going to look a lot worse as there's going to be you know some weird situations where you might actually get a sharper feed on a certain still frame somewhere as i found in my testing but then when you actually end up in situations where it just can't handle what's happening you're gonna get a lot more pixelation or macro blocking or little squares all over your image than you would with the two b frames in terms of comparing new nv ink versus old especially since i'm running on a 20 series card honestly i could not find much discernible difference it was actually comparing the 4b frame new nv ink versus old nv ink where i was able to notice a lot more of that more pixelization having that 4b frames enabled whereas with the 2b frames it looked nearly identical there's some frames i managed to find where it was a little bit sharper on the new nv ink but for the most part again as i've said over and over this is not meant to be a quality increase in the first place especially on newer capable hardware comparing the new nv ink to x264 fast you will notice in some scenarios which i got some complaints about that envy inc aims to kind of smooth out some areas in order to avoid pixelization whereas x264 tries to keep all those crispy details but then you end up with a lot of jagged edges or pixelation and little details that make it look a little gnarly or messy or nasty and even adds some haloing to text that is less obvious on envy inc and so that's kind of a difference in approach is that nvinc aims to kind of smooth out some of the pixelization to keep a cleaner looking image whereas x264 is more at least with the tuning that i used here was more focused on keeping it sharp at the risk of having a lot more added pixelization again recommended recording settings these are from nvidia which are vbr 40 megabits per second with a max of 60 megabits per second 2k two keyframe intervals still and then max quality high look ahead psycho visual tuning on and four max b frames i recorded ridiculously high bit rates 40 megabits would is not a limit that i keep myself to but for most people that's probably fine but yeah this is just a rehash just hopefully a complete start to finish explanation here of what's going on with this new envying stuff and what you need to know about it and as far as the actual obs update goes again in the future this could theoretically apply to at least amd gpu encoding and theoretically igpu quick sync stuff as well but it could be years before that ever happens i have no idea when that's coming i'm not going to hype it up as if that's next but it's certainly within the realm of possibility with this framework change that the obs devs have made so go check out my obs version 23 update video if you missed it uh go check out my nv ink quality comparison with my rtx 2080 if you missed that got a lot of streaming videos going onwhat's better what's the pros and cons what's the difference what is all this about i've received so many questions that i decided to make a dedicated video about this even though i will actually be using an excerpt from my obs version 23 update video where i did a breakdown of it but i left out a couple details by accident i spent a long time trying to make sure everything was in there but naturally something's always overlooked so i'm going to add in those extra details and show some more quality comparisons and do a little bit more of a deep dive i'm eposvox here to make tech easier and more fun and to summarize in a nutshell obs has updated the way that they use the nvidia nv ink encoder within their software in the upcoming version 23 update and i have a full explanation from the excerpt that i will play in a minute for you but they have reworked it to be better performing and give you more direct control over the encoder that you didn't have access to before which is pretty cool and kind of a big deal and eventually will benefit all gpus in terms of performance but there's some confusion regarding whether it benefits quality and things like that and as i will say in the clip the quality benefits come specifically from rtx 20 series touring graphics cards they have a bigger newer nv ink chip that is responsible for the quality increase that being said you could theoretically squeeze more quality out of your live stream especially if you're on an older card with these new settings but the settings themselves do not directly affect quality and i do want to discuss some of the actual hardware changes in a moment so the new envy inc settings and options and capabilities within obs studio do work with all nv ink capable graphics cards specifically from 700 series and newer you can you know you can sort of run them on the 600 series but i'm told that there's some issues with that and generally it's not recommended and so i'm not sure but obs may actually disable it for those cards at which point you would not be able to however it is validated as working as intended and you know benefiting on 700 series and video graphics cards and newer so you can use it on all graphics cards not just the new rtx cards so that's a big thing that i left out on my other video and this update does not address the gpu allocation bug where if you have a game using up most of your gpu and it's in focus obs is performance degrades i released a kind of ranty faq video about this and people thought the new envy inc might address it it can help it can help with it by reducing the gpu load by being more efficient but it is not a direct addressing of that or fix for that in the slightest so don't think that as far as quality goes of nv ink itself i did want to add and say at some point in a video the gtx 1060 through the 1080 ti for the most part has the same quality and capability of envy inc across all of those cards it's weaker on the 1050 ti and lower and it's lower quality and performing on older graphics cards each generation but the 1060 through the 1080 ti for normal game streaming uses has the same quality the 2060 through the 2080 ti for now also have the same quality between them so the 2060 will have the same envy ink as the 2080 ti and every card in between that could change in the future nvidia is always trying to come up with more features to utilize you know the extra cores and tensor cores and things like that on the cards so you may see some that benefit the newer car you know the higher end cards better than the lower end cards but in terms of raw encoding speed they are actually exactly the same if you actually look at nvidia's reference matrix uh with regards to envy inc and what the cards support and things like that you will notice that the 1080 and 1080 ti actually have two chips for envying and so for higher level applications where you're running multiple nvme streams at once back and forth you can actually get more out of it due to the extra nv capabilities on the 1080 ti but for normal obs use for most obs use at all and video rendering in like normal programs you know unless you have some complex way of accessing both streams it's still the same as the 1060 and things like that but they did decrease that back to one for even the 2080 ti and the 2080 for all the 20 series they found that they couldn't get the quality and performance they needed out of the dual chip layout and so they reduced it back to one and simply made it bigger there's now more silicon dedicated to envy inc on those cards but again this is just a hardware change this is just for how this affects the turing cards in terms of the actual obs update there's a little bit of a difference and i'm going to go on and play the clip from my obs update video because i do a really good job that i fact checked with multiple people of explaining the differences let's play that the next major change in this update is what's been commonly referred to as the new envy inc and again i want to do a little bit of myth busting here the actual quality improvements of nv inc on nvidia's new rtx 20 series turing graphics cards is primarily a hardware change there is a physical envy ink chip on the card that has been altered and improved to increase quality this applies to any use of the nv ink encoder with these cards in any program old obs updated obs video editing software anything the new nv ink settings in this obs update can help you squeeze a little bit more quality out of your stream by means of giving you more control but it's not a direct quality improvement that's not what the point of it is it is actually a hardware improvement on those 20 series cards i'm recording a video and i got a kitty climbing all over me say hello not to me to them hello i am stream kitty also this new encoding pipeline does not work on windows 7. obs will fall back to the old methods that i explain in a moment on windows 7. this should however work on windows 8.1 and obviously windows 10. this new envy inc is a complete rework of how obs interacts with the gpu for gpu-based encoding in previous versions of obs it was designed to to handle only raw video frames in system memory or ram the frames had to be copied from the gpu's vram to ram and then sent off to the encoder which at the time was predominantly x264 that ran on your cpu so that design made sense at the time and sending it from gpu to ram to cpu for encoding however because of this design that meant that when using gpu encoding like envy inc it would have to copy frames from vram to ram and then be sent off to envy inc which then would be copied back from ram to vram again resulting in an unnecessary round trip due to that video pipeline design this uses up more resources and bandwidth than is necessary and adds a little bit of latency in the latest version of obs there's now an additional discrete video pipeline for gpu encoders that can take a texture directly without moving any raw frames out of vram this eliminates the unnecessary vram to ram to vram round trip thus maximizing the potential performance of hardware encoders such as envy inc and reducing the impact that it might have on the games that you're running while streaming or recording on higher end systems where things were already running smoothly you may not notice any difference but in some side-by-side comparisons you could see as much as 5-10 frames per second or even more in some weird scenarios maybe increase in-game and that scales as hardware gets worse along with this update came more direct access to the envy inc tools and some new quality controls they're named a little silly but they let you do some cool stuff if you're in the obs advanced output mode two pass encoding is now no longer a direct option but it is automatically part of the max quality preset this determines how much load is put on the envy ink encoder to get the most quality most people can just use max quality and be fine but if you're getting encoder overloaded errors lower it to quality to see if that improves generally speaking profiles should always be set to high for these kinds of streaming purposes it tunes the encoder in a way that just needs to be set to that look ahead and psycho visual tuning are new options lookahead allows the encoder to dynamically change the amount of b frames between 0 and the max number that you input at the bottom of the ui where it says max b frames these are frames used to get the most quality out of your footage they're kind of like reference frames at full quality but they require a lot of bandwidth so on high motion content you don't always want a ton of those as they can reduce quality without enough bitrate assigned to your stream lookahead helps save you some trouble by automatically determining how much to use based on the frames or based on your content psycho visual tuning improves image quality on moving footage by enabling the rate distortion optimization which is just a setting within the encoder itself that affects high motion footage for high motion content shooters action games things like that set max b frames to two for low motion content such as card games or desktop capture things like that you can increase this to four however if you do see pixelization on stream consider reducing this back to two keyframe interval needs to be set for two as for streaming on twitch and youtube as always and set your max bit rate according to your streaming service and upload speed as usual i have a whole video on this in the description if you're interested also you do still technically have the option of offloading encoding onto a second gpu here but that will cause obs to fall back to the old nv inc implementation since you can't share this information between gpus directly either way keep in mind that this is generally a bad idea despite how many people have been suggesting it with my recent videos and does not address that gpu utilization issue that i talked about in my recent kind of ranty it was more like a faq video than anything you see obs itself still needs the render and composite on the gpu that your game or display is running on and that's where the bulk of obs gpu usage and impact comes from encoding is very efficient and it's on its own chip on the gpu so offloading that not only does not help your performance but it more or less negates any of this updated framework's benefits if you were able to do it within the new envy inc anyway it's also worth noting that within the new nv inc i am saying that wrong now you will be unable to apply rescaling during output if you want a different output resolution than your canvas you'll have to apply it universally in the video settings tab sucks but it's worth the trade-off if you do enable rescale output in the encoder settings for envy inc the obs will fall back to using the old env again the cool thing here is that theoretically this rework can be applied to all gpus in the future currently the only iteration is for nvidia cards and i can't even begin to speculate when amd or intel support will be added but the work done here can benefit everyone in the end it is worth noting here that there's a little bit of weirdness with the look ahead and psycho visual tuning features on rtx cards 20 series touring cards these use both the envy ink hardware and the cuda hardware the normal cuda hardware to really run them super hardcore and get much better results out of them whereas on older graphics cards it just uses cuda and so this combination of envy inc plus cuda usage is kind of running into that gpu allocation issue that i've mentioned which is on older cards you're actually demanding more of the gpu significantly more of the gpu using this recording or rendering method recording method encoding method that's the word i'm looking for than normal and then it is actually taking from rtx cards so worth noting there something i did want to add to that clip the rdo the rate distortion optimization that is enabled through the cycle visual tuning this is something typically reserved for x264 medium preset which is part of why it's so high quality and sort of an x264 fast which is why the cycle visual tuning upgrade is something that kind of gives it its edge and is actually a lot better on the touring graphics cards even though you can enable it on the older ones the only real disadvantage i had some people asking like pros and cons between the new and old envy ink for the most part you should always be using the new one because it's going to perform better and run better and do everything better but the only real disadvantage to the new envy inc is that inability to check the rescale output box on the encoder now it's always been more efficient to do this in the video tab because it does it on the actual gpu render load which does the scaling and it can do that really efficiently and doesn't take up much resources and is generally the best way to go but if you want to be able to stream and record at different resolutions you can't really do that here unless you're using x264 for your streaming and new envy ink for recording that way you only rescale during the x264 encode so that also means that if you have your scaled resolution set in the video tab like i recommended if you use the replay buffer it will be recording that in the quality of or in the resolution of that scaled resolution set in your video tap so you would be unable to get native resolution you know full 1080p or whatever replay buffer if you have it set scaled to 720p or 864 or 900p or whatever i think it's worth the trade-off for the extra performance benefit and honestly if you're throwing enough bitrate at your recordings especially if it's a replay buffer like your recordings aren't going to be that long in the first place throw a high enough crf value like a 12 or a 14 at it or a high enough bitrate and something like that doesn't really matter in my opinion because you can still scale it back up and mostly maintain quality in terms of recommended settings nvidia's recommended settings for fast paced games action games shooters things like that is to set it to cbr of course because you have to for streaming but then full max bit rate of 6k or 8k depending on if you want to push twitch past its recommended limits i stick with 6k for all of my testing and samples here keyframe interval 2 seconds is required but then preset is max quality which enables 2-pass encoding and it's just going to be the best profile set to high of course and then turn look ahead off and turn on psycho visual tuning and then leave max b frames at 2. this is recommended for fast paced games for slower paced games it's or for recordings if you're doing recordings at high bit rate it's recommended to turn on look ahead and leave max b frames at 4 or set it to 4 rather this can be extended during recording because you have enough bandwidth in your bitrate to have those bigger b frames and not get pixelization whereas during live streaming you don't have enough in your small live streaming bitrate to have multiple b frames back to back to back eating up bandwidth and i have a full explanation in that previous clip that kind of explains what they are four can look better i'm showing i have some i've recorded some tests here i took a lossless recording using the ut video lossless encoding that i showed off in a previous video of my of a game of apex legends captured by a capture card at full rgb so as close to lossless as i could get it recorded it in youtube video and then ran that as a media source through obs on a 20 series card a 2080 at a few different settings i did the new nv ink at the recommended settings of look ahead off and two b frames and then through the slower preset of look ahead on and four 4b frames and then i ran it through old old nv ink and i ran it through x264 fast and i tried running it through quick sync but apparently there's some issue with quick sync drivers in obs right now that just caused it to crash so i couldn't test that right now that sucks but you can actually turn on of course four b frames and look ahead for fast-paced action games and in some scenarios it's gonna look better but in many other scenarios it's going to look a lot worse as there's going to be you know some weird situations where you might actually get a sharper feed on a certain still frame somewhere as i found in my testing but then when you actually end up in situations where it just can't handle what's happening you're gonna get a lot more pixelation or macro blocking or little squares all over your image than you would with the two b frames in terms of comparing new nv ink versus old especially since i'm running on a 20 series card honestly i could not find much discernible difference it was actually comparing the 4b frame new nv ink versus old nv ink where i was able to notice a lot more of that more pixelization having that 4b frames enabled whereas with the 2b frames it looked nearly identical there's some frames i managed to find where it was a little bit sharper on the new nv ink but for the most part again as i've said over and over this is not meant to be a quality increase in the first place especially on newer capable hardware comparing the new nv ink to x264 fast you will notice in some scenarios which i got some complaints about that envy inc aims to kind of smooth out some areas in order to avoid pixelization whereas x264 tries to keep all those crispy details but then you end up with a lot of jagged edges or pixelation and little details that make it look a little gnarly or messy or nasty and even adds some haloing to text that is less obvious on envy inc and so that's kind of a difference in approach is that nvinc aims to kind of smooth out some of the pixelization to keep a cleaner looking image whereas x264 is more at least with the tuning that i used here was more focused on keeping it sharp at the risk of having a lot more added pixelization again recommended recording settings these are from nvidia which are vbr 40 megabits per second with a max of 60 megabits per second 2k two keyframe intervals still and then max quality high look ahead psycho visual tuning on and four max b frames i recorded ridiculously high bit rates 40 megabits would is not a limit that i keep myself to but for most people that's probably fine but yeah this is just a rehash just hopefully a complete start to finish explanation here of what's going on with this new envying stuff and what you need to know about it and as far as the actual obs update goes again in the future this could theoretically apply to at least amd gpu encoding and theoretically igpu quick sync stuff as well but it could be years before that ever happens i have no idea when that's coming i'm not going to hype it up as if that's next but it's certainly within the realm of possibility with this framework change that the obs devs have made so go check out my obs version 23 update video if you missed it uh go check out my nv ink quality comparison with my rtx 2080 if you missed that got a lot of streaming videos going on\n"