I was doing some test encodes with MediaCoder just for the sake of doing the good old "eye test" in comparing various AVC and HEVC presets utilizing x264, x265, and NVENC. You can find the test encodes here.
I've got an i7-6700K and a GTX 960 in my rig presently, if that matters.
My source clip was made using a screen recording of Turok 2 utilizing Bandicam's highest HEVC recording setting which utilizes NVENC. Bandicam's setting specifies 100Mbps, but the file ended up being around only 20Mbps according to MediaInfo. The keyframe interval was set to 1. I used Turok 2 because it seemed to me that the differences in various settings were most easily identifiable with simple, low-resolution textures.
Inside MediaCoder, all the settings are left to default (so 2 B-Frames, 250 GOP on everything for example) except for the x264/x265 quality presets, which were Ultrafast, Medium, and Very Slow respectively. All of my re-encodes were done at 1kbps, since to me it was easiest to see the differences in encoding quality as well as clue in on how the encoders function (motion vs. still images, etc.) at a very low bitrate. The encoder "source" is left to auto.
And...according to this test, while NVENC suffers heavily against x265, it actually does better than x264's "very slow" preset in this case. The way it preserves the look of the portal in the video is especially noteworthy.
That kind of sounds like heresy.
Is MediaCoder doing something funky and causing this to happen? Because everywhere I read, NVENC shouldn't be competing with x264 at anything over "very fast".
I've got an i7-6700K and a GTX 960 in my rig presently, if that matters.
My source clip was made using a screen recording of Turok 2 utilizing Bandicam's highest HEVC recording setting which utilizes NVENC. Bandicam's setting specifies 100Mbps, but the file ended up being around only 20Mbps according to MediaInfo. The keyframe interval was set to 1. I used Turok 2 because it seemed to me that the differences in various settings were most easily identifiable with simple, low-resolution textures.
Inside MediaCoder, all the settings are left to default (so 2 B-Frames, 250 GOP on everything for example) except for the x264/x265 quality presets, which were Ultrafast, Medium, and Very Slow respectively. All of my re-encodes were done at 1kbps, since to me it was easiest to see the differences in encoding quality as well as clue in on how the encoders function (motion vs. still images, etc.) at a very low bitrate. The encoder "source" is left to auto.
And...according to this test, while NVENC suffers heavily against x265, it actually does better than x264's "very slow" preset in this case. The way it preserves the look of the portal in the video is especially noteworthy.
That kind of sounds like heresy.
Is MediaCoder doing something funky and causing this to happen? Because everywhere I read, NVENC shouldn't be competing with x264 at anything over "very fast".