Streaming Comparison: H.264 vs Turing and Vank Encoders

The world of streaming has undergone significant changes with the advent of new technologies and advancements in hardware. One such area that has seen considerable improvement is in video encoding, particularly in terms of compression efficiency and visual quality. In this article, we'll be comparing the popular H.264 encoder with two newer alternatives: Turing and Vank encoders.

**Comparing H.264 Encoding with Lower Compression**

To start our comparison, let's look at a stream with lower compression, such as 720p 60fps at 3500 kilobits per second. This stream is being played back at 50% speed to make it easier to compare. Our first observation here is that the comparison is quite close, but I'd have to give the win to Turing and Vank for overall visual quality. The Touring encoder performs slightly better than H.264 for fast preset all the way up to Left, while still showing a noticeable difference over X.264 Medium.

**Comparing Streaming with Higher Compression**

When we increase the amount of compression, however, our results become truly mind-blowing. Here, the bitrate is fairly constrained at 3500 kilobits per second for a 1080p 60fps stream. The Touring and Vank encoder far exceeds what we can achieve with H.264 Medium. To further analyze these differences, let's take a look at some freeze frames from this stream.

**Freeze Frames: A Closer Look**

Remember that we're comparing the same resolution, same bitrate, and even just a single frame, different encoders and settings. Yet, the difference is night and day. While both X.264 encoded streams are an absolute mess, Touring and Vank are able to recover the majority of the original frame, with some detail lost but overall still showing a significant improvement. In particular, when looking at the damage value (or lack thereof), we can actually see that our opponent (the opponent being the details in the image) is readable, whereas X.264 has smoothed out and lost much of this detail.

**Comparing Streaming at Moderate Bitrates**

When we bump the bitrate up to something more adequate, such as 6000 kilobits per second for a 1080p 60fps stream, I'd say that Touring and Vank encoder is still slightly better than X.264 Fast in most comparisons, due to less fuzziness and noise. However, it loses out to X.264 Medium when it comes to detail, particularly in terms of retained textures – there's much more detail retained on the place glove in this comparison.

**The Bigger Picture: Performance vs Quality**

Of course, the bigger picture here is that for the marginal reduction in performance (5% decrease in FPS), I think it's worth losing just 30 percent of the quality – the trade-off in less detailed textures for the sake of slightly lower CPU usage. This is especially true when streaming at lower bitrates due to slower internet connections. In this case, Touring and Vank encoder truly dominates even over X.264 Medium.

**Upgrading Your GPU: Is it Worth It?**

For those thinking of upgrading their current GPU to a Turing GPU for streaming, I'd encourage this upgrade – especially if you want to stream at lower bitrates. This would certainly make a noticeable difference in terms of visual quality and overall performance. However, if you already have a recent NVIDIA GPU with Touring technology and can stream at higher bitrates, then the upgrade might not be worth it.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, streaming has made significant strides in terms of compression efficiency and visual quality. While X.264 remains a popular choice for its balance between performance and quality, Turing and Vank encoders are truly beasts when it comes to encoding low-bitrate streams. Whether you're a seasoned streamer or just starting out, I'd highly recommend exploring the capabilities of these newer encoders – your viewers will thank you.

**NVIDIA Streaming GPUs: A Great Choice**

For those thinking of upgrading their hardware for streaming, I'd like to emphasize that NVIDIA stirring GPUs are an excellent choice. They offer a great balance between performance and quality, making them well-suited for even the most demanding streams. If you're looking to upgrade your current GPU or start building a new rig for streaming, consider one of these powerful GPUs.

**Feedback and Future Testing**

As always, I'd love to hear from our readers – if you have any feedback on this testing or suggestions for future benchmarks, please don't hesitate to drop them in the comments below. Let's keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible with video encoding!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso one of the most talked-about features on invidious mute Turing GPUs is the new and vank video encoder with more gamers looking to stream on twitch than ever before I'm interested to see how much better than you invent encoder is compared to the old one and also compared to traditional x264 encoding via the CPU so Nvidia are claiming that just with a single Turing GPU that you can achieve a pro level broadcast quality for your stream whereas before that would have required a multi-core CPU and created a significant load on the CPU which would have created quite a lot of framerate drops so today we're going to see how much better is the new Turing and vent encoder compared to the old one we're going to see how it compares to x264 encoding and we're going to see sort of what quality you can expect so I know the title says r-tx GPUs but the new invention coda is also included on the turing gtx cards and currently that's the gtx 1660 and the 1660 TI and yes it's the same inventor chip - so aside from the memory speeds and GPU performance the encoding capabilities should be near identical across the board now in video are claiming significant visual quality improvements in streaming over the 10 series GPUs but more importantly even over CPUs using the x264 fast preset in OBS to give some rough perspective here to run the x264 fast preset smoothly without a significant impact yield gaming you want to be running a high coil count CPU like the rise in 2700 X for those who aren't familiar with these quality presets in OBS essentially the slower preset that you use the more your gaming experience is going to be impacted the more frames will potentially be skipped on the streaming end but in return you get superior streaming quality typically the x264 medium preset is regarded as the goal for professional streaming quality but usually requires a very high coil count CPU like the thread reports colic X CPUs or ideally a dual system setup so from a budget standpoint if a mainstream GPU like the gtx 660ti can deliver comparable streaming quality but with less load on the CPU that's a pretty big deal so the exact cheap use that I'm using for this testing are the GTX 1080 to represent the old invent hardware and the r-tx 2080 to represent the new and vank hardware of course the performance difference in terms of fps is significant between these two GPUs but since that's not directly what we're comparing between the two it doesn't make a difference for the x26 for encoding comparisons I've used the Rison 2700 X it's an 8 quart 16 thread CPU which most of you are familiar with and I think it represents what most streamers would go for if they're considering a CPU encoded stream on a single PC within a main stream level budget now although I really want to focus mostly on image quality comparisons today I did first want to start off with some context here in terms of how much frame rate we're actually losing with each setup so here we're looking at how much frame rate is retained in game while streaming from OBS to twitch compared to gaming while not streaming at all so starting with the streaming set to 1080p 60fps at 6000 kilobits per second both the N vacant coated streams lose about 5 percent of average fps and about 10% of these slowest of 1% of fps but more notably there's no significant difference between the old and new and fake hardware that is I found about the same percentage of reduction in performance of while streaming on the RT X 2080 compared to the GTX 1080 cpu-based x264 encoding on the other hand takes quite a chunk out of the frame rate at least on the presets that I've tested here so we've got about a 20% reduction in average FPS for the faster preset about 25% for the fast preset and about 30% for the medium preset again this was done with an 8 quart 16 thread Rison 2,700 X so if you have a weaker CPU you'd see a much larger hit and with a stronger CPU you'd see less of a hit when reducing these streaming settings to just 720p 60fps at 3500 kilobits per second received much less of a reduction in framerate mainly on the CPUs whereas previously we were losing around 20 to 30% of framerate we're not only losing about 10 to 15% it's a big improvement but it's still significantly more FPS lost compared to streaming with the NVIDIA GPUs using an vank which are now only losing about 4 to 5 percent in fps overall so the performance hit is much less while streaming with and but the big question is what about the streaming quality now let's start by comparing the old and vank encoder to the new and vank encoder to see whether there really has been an improvement for the quality comparisons here we'll be using Apex legends for a few reasons it's one of the most played and streamed games at the moment and it's also very fast paced which means that there's going to be a large amount of new pixel information to process for each frame so with our most demanding streaming settings here at 1080p 60fps at 6000 kilobits per second we are seeing some difference between the two with the two streams side-by-side the GTX 1080 stream is noticeably more fuzzy and blocking on the left whereas the r-tx 2080 doesn't seem to suffer from the same amount of compression when we analyze a couple of frames side by side there honestly doesn't seem to be much significant difference between them there is slightly more smoothing of textures on the r-tx 2080 though but that's really it the biggest difference is when the streams are played side-by-side in real time in which case the turing and vank stream is a lot easier to watch due to being less fuzzy so at 6000 kilobits per second the neutering and vent is slightly better but when we reduce the bitrate to 3500 kilobits per second at 1080p 60fps the difference between them is truly night and day if there's a single thing that you take away from this video it's that at lower bitrate the touring and vank encoder has been drastically improved we see noticeably less compression and blockiness between frames better defined edges and text is a lot more readable on tearing this continues when we drop the resolution down to 720p at 60 fps at a bit rate of 2500 kilobits per second but since the compression isn't so bad here the difference between them is less noticeable still though the touring and vinq does look less fuzzy and blocky and it is a bit more pleasing to watch overall okay so touring and vent is definitely better in terms of visual quality compared to previous generation and bank but how does it compare to x264 encoding on the cpu let's start with a stream in comparison with less compression and that's 720p 60fps at 3500 kilobits per second also this comparison is being played at 50% speed to make it a bit easier to compare so here the comparison is honestly quite close but I'd have to give the win to x264 medium Prius here for overall visual quality I would say that the touring and does look better than the x26 for fast preset all the way to the left and similar to our other comparisons the new invention coda doesn't suffer from as much visible compression and fuzziness x264 medium doesn't suffer from as much compression artifacts either but at the same time it's able to retain much more detail in the textures which are otherwise smoothed out by the new invention coda that changes drastically though when we increase the amount of compression and here the results truly are mind-blowing so here the bitrate is fairly constrained with a 1080p 60fps stream running at just 3500 kilobits per second and the touring and vank encoder far exceeds even what we can achieve with x264 medium let's take a look at a couple freeze frames here to analyze things further so remember this is the same resolution same bitrate same frame just different encoders and settings yet the difference is night and day whereas both x264 encoded streams are an absolute mess the Turing and Vinc is able to recover the majority of the original frame sure some detail is lost and the image is overall quite smooth but at least it is a representative of the actual original frame the damage value is actually readable here and the opponent can actually be made out this follows on to pretty much any scene and side-by-side comparison that we can make and the bottom line is that the touring and vank encoder is an absolute beast when it comes to encoding low bitrate streams when we bump the bitrate up to something more adequate and honestly realistic like 6000 kilobits per second at 1080p 60fps I'd say that the Turing and Vinc is a bit better than x264 fast in most comparisons due to less fuzziness and noise but it does lose to the x264 medium preset in my opinion seeing as it can't retain as much detail in this comparison for example there's much more detail retained on the place glove in the x264 medium but Anvik still looks better than the x264 fast in this comparison again and vinq overall does look marginally better than x264 fast here although some small details are smoothed out and lost in the roof and the background overall it seems when the bit rate is just adequate the new end of encoder is slightly better than x264 fast but loses out x264 medium when it comes to detail the bigger picture here of course is that for the marginal reduction in performance I say that the slight loss in detail at moderate bit rigs does make the neutering and vank encoder a much more superior choice even over x264 medium I think we'd all rather lose just 5% of FPS on average instead of 30 percent for the trade-off in less detailed textures if you are forced to stream at lower bit rates due to a slower internet connection for example this is where the Turing and Venky coder really dominates even over X 256 for medium at those lower bit rates there's definitely more legible text and overall a better representation of the original image now for those thinking of upgrading their current GPU to a Turing GPU for streaming that's something that I would encourage especially if you want to stream out lower bit rates however if you already have a recent NVIDIA GPU with an invention coda and you can stream at higher bit rates then honestly the upgrade might not be worth it if you're already getting a fragrance that you desire in games if you were planning on upgrading a GPU anyway and you want to get into streaming then Nvidia stiring GPUs are a great choice and to answer the title of this video yes there it definitely has been an improvement so I'd love to know your thoughts down below on the streaming comparisons and if you are like me and you were quite surprised to see what you know a Turing GPU could achieve with those lower bit rates I mean it really does make sense for streamers who have a slower internet connection even picking up something like a gtx 1660 that does make for you know a suitable and watchable stream in my opinion even better than streaming on x264 medium like we saw also since this was our first look at streaming benchmarks let me know if you'd like to see any settings that we looked at changed if you have any feedback for this testing moving forward definitely drop those in the comments down below as always guys a huge thanks for watching consider subscribing down below and I'll see you all in the next oneso one of the most talked-about features on invidious mute Turing GPUs is the new and vank video encoder with more gamers looking to stream on twitch than ever before I'm interested to see how much better than you invent encoder is compared to the old one and also compared to traditional x264 encoding via the CPU so Nvidia are claiming that just with a single Turing GPU that you can achieve a pro level broadcast quality for your stream whereas before that would have required a multi-core CPU and created a significant load on the CPU which would have created quite a lot of framerate drops so today we're going to see how much better is the new Turing and vent encoder compared to the old one we're going to see how it compares to x264 encoding and we're going to see sort of what quality you can expect so I know the title says r-tx GPUs but the new invention coda is also included on the turing gtx cards and currently that's the gtx 1660 and the 1660 TI and yes it's the same inventor chip - so aside from the memory speeds and GPU performance the encoding capabilities should be near identical across the board now in video are claiming significant visual quality improvements in streaming over the 10 series GPUs but more importantly even over CPUs using the x264 fast preset in OBS to give some rough perspective here to run the x264 fast preset smoothly without a significant impact yield gaming you want to be running a high coil count CPU like the rise in 2700 X for those who aren't familiar with these quality presets in OBS essentially the slower preset that you use the more your gaming experience is going to be impacted the more frames will potentially be skipped on the streaming end but in return you get superior streaming quality typically the x264 medium preset is regarded as the goal for professional streaming quality but usually requires a very high coil count CPU like the thread reports colic X CPUs or ideally a dual system setup so from a budget standpoint if a mainstream GPU like the gtx 660ti can deliver comparable streaming quality but with less load on the CPU that's a pretty big deal so the exact cheap use that I'm using for this testing are the GTX 1080 to represent the old invent hardware and the r-tx 2080 to represent the new and vank hardware of course the performance difference in terms of fps is significant between these two GPUs but since that's not directly what we're comparing between the two it doesn't make a difference for the x26 for encoding comparisons I've used the Rison 2700 X it's an 8 quart 16 thread CPU which most of you are familiar with and I think it represents what most streamers would go for if they're considering a CPU encoded stream on a single PC within a main stream level budget now although I really want to focus mostly on image quality comparisons today I did first want to start off with some context here in terms of how much frame rate we're actually losing with each setup so here we're looking at how much frame rate is retained in game while streaming from OBS to twitch compared to gaming while not streaming at all so starting with the streaming set to 1080p 60fps at 6000 kilobits per second both the N vacant coated streams lose about 5 percent of average fps and about 10% of these slowest of 1% of fps but more notably there's no significant difference between the old and new and fake hardware that is I found about the same percentage of reduction in performance of while streaming on the RT X 2080 compared to the GTX 1080 cpu-based x264 encoding on the other hand takes quite a chunk out of the frame rate at least on the presets that I've tested here so we've got about a 20% reduction in average FPS for the faster preset about 25% for the fast preset and about 30% for the medium preset again this was done with an 8 quart 16 thread Rison 2,700 X so if you have a weaker CPU you'd see a much larger hit and with a stronger CPU you'd see less of a hit when reducing these streaming settings to just 720p 60fps at 3500 kilobits per second received much less of a reduction in framerate mainly on the CPUs whereas previously we were losing around 20 to 30% of framerate we're not only losing about 10 to 15% it's a big improvement but it's still significantly more FPS lost compared to streaming with the NVIDIA GPUs using an vank which are now only losing about 4 to 5 percent in fps overall so the performance hit is much less while streaming with and but the big question is what about the streaming quality now let's start by comparing the old and vank encoder to the new and vank encoder to see whether there really has been an improvement for the quality comparisons here we'll be using Apex legends for a few reasons it's one of the most played and streamed games at the moment and it's also very fast paced which means that there's going to be a large amount of new pixel information to process for each frame so with our most demanding streaming settings here at 1080p 60fps at 6000 kilobits per second we are seeing some difference between the two with the two streams side-by-side the GTX 1080 stream is noticeably more fuzzy and blocking on the left whereas the r-tx 2080 doesn't seem to suffer from the same amount of compression when we analyze a couple of frames side by side there honestly doesn't seem to be much significant difference between them there is slightly more smoothing of textures on the r-tx 2080 though but that's really it the biggest difference is when the streams are played side-by-side in real time in which case the turing and vank stream is a lot easier to watch due to being less fuzzy so at 6000 kilobits per second the neutering and vent is slightly better but when we reduce the bitrate to 3500 kilobits per second at 1080p 60fps the difference between them is truly night and day if there's a single thing that you take away from this video it's that at lower bitrate the touring and vank encoder has been drastically improved we see noticeably less compression and blockiness between frames better defined edges and text is a lot more readable on tearing this continues when we drop the resolution down to 720p at 60 fps at a bit rate of 2500 kilobits per second but since the compression isn't so bad here the difference between them is less noticeable still though the touring and vinq does look less fuzzy and blocky and it is a bit more pleasing to watch overall okay so touring and vent is definitely better in terms of visual quality compared to previous generation and bank but how does it compare to x264 encoding on the cpu let's start with a stream in comparison with less compression and that's 720p 60fps at 3500 kilobits per second also this comparison is being played at 50% speed to make it a bit easier to compare so here the comparison is honestly quite close but I'd have to give the win to x264 medium Prius here for overall visual quality I would say that the touring and does look better than the x26 for fast preset all the way to the left and similar to our other comparisons the new invention coda doesn't suffer from as much visible compression and fuzziness x264 medium doesn't suffer from as much compression artifacts either but at the same time it's able to retain much more detail in the textures which are otherwise smoothed out by the new invention coda that changes drastically though when we increase the amount of compression and here the results truly are mind-blowing so here the bitrate is fairly constrained with a 1080p 60fps stream running at just 3500 kilobits per second and the touring and vank encoder far exceeds even what we can achieve with x264 medium let's take a look at a couple freeze frames here to analyze things further so remember this is the same resolution same bitrate same frame just different encoders and settings yet the difference is night and day whereas both x264 encoded streams are an absolute mess the Turing and Vinc is able to recover the majority of the original frame sure some detail is lost and the image is overall quite smooth but at least it is a representative of the actual original frame the damage value is actually readable here and the opponent can actually be made out this follows on to pretty much any scene and side-by-side comparison that we can make and the bottom line is that the touring and vank encoder is an absolute beast when it comes to encoding low bitrate streams when we bump the bitrate up to something more adequate and honestly realistic like 6000 kilobits per second at 1080p 60fps I'd say that the Turing and Vinc is a bit better than x264 fast in most comparisons due to less fuzziness and noise but it does lose to the x264 medium preset in my opinion seeing as it can't retain as much detail in this comparison for example there's much more detail retained on the place glove in the x264 medium but Anvik still looks better than the x264 fast in this comparison again and vinq overall does look marginally better than x264 fast here although some small details are smoothed out and lost in the roof and the background overall it seems when the bit rate is just adequate the new end of encoder is slightly better than x264 fast but loses out x264 medium when it comes to detail the bigger picture here of course is that for the marginal reduction in performance I say that the slight loss in detail at moderate bit rigs does make the neutering and vank encoder a much more superior choice even over x264 medium I think we'd all rather lose just 5% of FPS on average instead of 30 percent for the trade-off in less detailed textures if you are forced to stream at lower bit rates due to a slower internet connection for example this is where the Turing and Venky coder really dominates even over X 256 for medium at those lower bit rates there's definitely more legible text and overall a better representation of the original image now for those thinking of upgrading their current GPU to a Turing GPU for streaming that's something that I would encourage especially if you want to stream out lower bit rates however if you already have a recent NVIDIA GPU with an invention coda and you can stream at higher bit rates then honestly the upgrade might not be worth it if you're already getting a fragrance that you desire in games if you were planning on upgrading a GPU anyway and you want to get into streaming then Nvidia stiring GPUs are a great choice and to answer the title of this video yes there it definitely has been an improvement so I'd love to know your thoughts down below on the streaming comparisons and if you are like me and you were quite surprised to see what you know a Turing GPU could achieve with those lower bit rates I mean it really does make sense for streamers who have a slower internet connection even picking up something like a gtx 1660 that does make for you know a suitable and watchable stream in my opinion even better than streaming on x264 medium like we saw also since this was our first look at streaming benchmarks let me know if you'd like to see any settings that we looked at changed if you have any feedback for this testing moving forward definitely drop those in the comments down below as always guys a huge thanks for watching consider subscribing down below and I'll see you all in the next one\n"