OBS studio with support for NVIDIA NVENC AV1
A popular streaming and recording software will now benefit from RTX 40 powerful AV1 encoding hardware.
The latest release of OBS brings support for AV1 recording with NVIDIA NVENC encoder on RTX 40 GPUs. The RTX 4090, the only model available which based on Ada architecture, has dual AV1 encoders. This is an eight generation NVENC encoder that officially provides twice as fast H.265 encoding and support for AV1.
The AV1 encoding option now shows up for recording, but it is not yet available for streaming because no platform supports this format.
OBS 28.1 with NVENC AV1 encoder, Source: VideoCardz
The AV1 encoding currently only works with NV12 (8-bit, 4:2:0) and P010 (10-bit, 4:2:0) color modes. The AV1 encoding requires more powerful hardware than H.264 and H.265. The main advantage of AV1 encoding is no licensing fee, which is not the case with HEVC encoders.
According to independent testing, AV1 is up to 30% more efficient than H.265 while delivering better quality images. For this reason, the GPU market has every reason to pursue AV1 encoding and decoding, which should eventually lead to higher popularity of free video formats. The AV1 encoding is also supported by Intel Arc GPUs, even on the A380 which costs 11 times less than RTX 4090.
28.1 Changes
- Added NVENC AV1 hardware encoder on Windows [Jim]
- Currently only works with the NV12 (OBS default) and P010 color formats
- Currently does not support the “rescale” feature in advanced output mode
- Only available for RTX 40 Series video cards from NVIDIA
- Updated NVENC presets [Jim]
- Presets have been split into 3 different settings: Preset, Tuning, and Multipass mode
- Presets are now P1-P7, lower numbers being lower quality, higher numbers being higher quality. Note that higher presets may incur higher GPU usage which could impact the performance of games running simultaneously with OBS. The number of simultaneous NVENC encoding sessions may be lower when using the highest presets. OBS will automatically map your current NVENC settings to the closest preset when upgrading.
- Tuning is used to determine whether to prioritize latency or quality. It has three settings: High Quality, Low Latency, and Ultra Low Latency.
- Multipass Mode is used to determine whether a second pass is used in encoding, and has three settings: Disabled, Quarter Resolution, and Full Resolution. Enabling this will give higher quality at the cost of more GPU resource usage.
- Fixed a bug where Direct3D 9 games stopped capturing properly with game capture on Windows 11 22H2 [Rodney]
- Moved “Always on Top” to the View menu [gxalpha]
- You can now select a specific source for the Virtual Camera [chippydip]
- Fixed a crash on resolution change of Windows Virtual Camera [Jim]
- Fixed a Discord crash with Windows Virtual Camera [Jim]
- Fixed crashes with macOS applications loading the virtual camera [PatTheMav]
- Fixed Steam version launching x86_64 version on Apple Silicon devices [Rodney]
- Fixed Stats widget appearance issues [tytan652]
- Fixed Blend Method in Studio Mode [rcdrone]
- Fixed case where video capture is darkened when both luma wipe and scale filtering are set [rcdrone]
Source: OBS via TechPowerUP
