Hardware Accelerated encoding and H.265

[MajorFoley]

Hi guys so probably a bit of a newbie question here. Thanks to user Poisondeathray who showed me Voukoder which solved a bunch of my rendering problems for gameplay videos I was wondering about hardware accelerated encoding and H.265. I usually render with voukoder's x264 option at CRF 14-17

The Obvious question i guess to get out of the way is that when i record my videos at least PC wise i use NVENC new with CQP 14 (which I think by default is X264?) Is it really that much of a difference if i was to render out using X264 or X265 in terms of size or quality? These are primarily only going to YouTube after all so i dont imagine quality difference is going to be that much different. Still on 1080P although looking forward to going 1440P this year.

The other part of my question I've never really used the GPU options when rendering videos out. I know its supposed to help speed up rendering times but is there any compromises to this normally and is it worth using that option if you have a more modern CPU??

Main Specs are:
Ryzen 7 3700x
Nvidia RTX 3070
G.skill 32GB of ram @ 3600
1TB SATA SSD (where it comes from and gets rendered to)

[blud7]

Just guessing that you mean you are using NVENC to export as h264 and h265, not x264 and x265.
If that is the case then yes you will achieve better quality per bit rate with h265.
here x265 > x264 > NVENC h265 (HEVC)> NVENC h264 (AVC) in terms of size AND quality

[MajorFoley]

Just guessing that you mean you are using NVENC to export as h264 and h265, not x264 and x265.
If that is the case then yes you will achieve better quality per bit rate with h265.
here x265 > x264 > NVENC h265 (HEVC)> NVENC h264 (AVC) in terms of size AND quality

Yup thats what i mean So why does NVENC helping supposedly do a worse job? At least thats what i see people say over the net. Would happy to be corrected if this is wrong. Is there any difference in the quality if you use 20 series+ cards compared to their older series ones with exporting in NVENC as well?

[Alkl]

Yup thats what i mean So why does NVENC helping supposedly do a worse job? At least thats what i see people say over the net. Would happy to be corrected if this is wrong. Is there any difference in the quality if you use 20 series+ cards compared to their older series ones with exporting in NVENC as well?

Turing Cards and newer (20 series+) support B-Frames compared to Pascal Cards (10 series).

Ampere has roughly the same NVENC Encoder as Turing, but the Decoder (NVDEC) supports AV1 decoding.

Yes, you will have different compression between Pascal and Turing, which implies different quality.

Technically Software based encoders (e.g. x265 and x264) are better than NVENC, when it comes to compression/quality.
NVENC however has the advantage of being alot faster, being in a clear advantage if you want to do a game capture or a quick (and dirty) transcode.

EposVox uses NVENC for archival purpose, which is totally fine, if a preset with a somewhat high(er) bitrate is choosen, than the software based counterpart.

Hardware based encoders (NVENC) are (kinda) limited to what they can do. Yes, they produce a bitstream which fullfills the (H265/H264) specification, but they lack internal loop-filters and algorithms which can't be multithreaded.
Software based encoders however let you set a lot of settings and presets, which can go as slow as you want. I won't go into detail when it comes to the weird scaling of x265, where slower presets produce higher bitrate, whereas x264 delivers less bitrate with slower preset.

Software based encoders CAN deliver different results on different system, when for example one system lack some CPU instruction, which disables certain compression algorithms.

Just a refresher:
H.265 = HEVC = MPEG-H Part 2 -> Video compression standard
x.265 -> Video Encoder which implemented the "HEVC" compression standard

In the end it's up to you, what you choose to encode.

If you do YouTube: Use NVENC h264 for capturing your gameplay. Using NVENC h265 might reduce your ability to edit the video "smoothly". Compressing the final video with x.265/h.265 encoders doesn't make sense, as YouTube re-encodes it anyway.

[MajorFoley]

Yup thats what i mean So why does NVENC helping supposedly do a worse job? At least thats what i see people say over the net. Would happy to be corrected if this is wrong. Is there any difference in the quality if you use 20 series+ cards compared to their older series ones with exporting in NVENC as well?

Turing Cards and newer (20 series+) support B-Frames compared to Pascal Cards (10 series).

Ampere has roughly the same NVENC Encoder as Turing, but the Decoder (NVDEC) supports AV1 decoding.

Yes, you will have different compression between Pascal and Turing, which implies different quality.

Technically Software based encoders (e.g. x265 and x264) are better than NVENC, when it comes to compression/quality.
NVENC however has the advantage of being alot faster, being in a clear advantage if you want to do a game capture or a quick (and dirty) transcode.

EposVox uses NVENC for archival purpose, which is totally fine, if a preset with a somewhat high(er) bitrate is choosen, than the software based counterpart.

Hardware based encoders (NVENC) are (kinda) limited to what they can do. Yes, they produce a bitstream which fullfills the (H265/H264) specification, but they lack internal loop-filters and algorithms which can't be multithreaded.
Software based encoders however let you set a lot of settings and presets, which can go as slow as you want. I won't go into detail when it comes to the weird scaling of x265, where slower presets produce higher bitrate, whereas x264 delivers less bitrate with slower preset.

Software based encoders CAN deliver different results on different system, when for example one system lack some CPU instruction, which disables certain compression algorithms.

Just a refresher:
H.265 = HEVC = MPEG-H Part 2 -> Video compression standard
x.265 -> Video Encoder which implemented the "HEVC" compression standard

In the end it's up to you, what you choose to encode.

If you do YouTube: Use NVENC h264 for capturing your gameplay. Using NVENC h265 might reduce your ability to edit the video "smoothly". Compressing the final video with x.265/h.265 encoders doesn't make sense, as YouTube re-encodes it anyway.

Thanks for that. Yeah with a 30 series card (whenever the hell it gets back from RMA from ASUS at least). I use NVENC (new) with OBS and CQP 14 which is great. Guess i will try some Voukoder h265 exports in Vegas and see how they go compared to X264 renders with a few private uploads but think will stick with x264 in the end. I tend to use the medium preset and a CRF rate 14-17. Realistically i don't mind if it takes longer to render. Not like I'm in some company with a time frame or anything just doing this for fun

IIRC youtube when it compresses it again anyway puts it back to AVC1 or something if your not 1440P and above/if your not a big channel anyway. Though it does say on its supported formats it has h.265 but your right it probably goes back to x264 since it has that on its recommended encoding page.

Thanks for the answers guys