WARNING: NVidia GTX 1650 doesn't have the Turing encoder's B-Frames support

[hiroo]

I've been patiently waiting for the GTX 1650 release because I wanted a card for NVenc with the new Turing B-frame support.

Sadly, today is the release and according to the specs on Nvidia's site, the GTX 1650 under Full Specs, says, "NVIDIA Encoder (NVENC): Yes (Volta)". This is compared to the GTX 1660, which says "Yes (Turing)". So strange that they would make a new Turning chip with an old encoder.

Am I right that this means the 1650 doesn't have B-Frame support for NVenc HEVC encoding?

This is a huge disappointment because I don't game, so since the card would pretty much exclusively be for encoding, it's hard to justify the +$120 added to get to the 1660. I previously tried the 1050 for encoding, and it was great in terms of speed, but the HEVC files produced were 30% larger than x265 software encoding, so I returned it. I was hoping the 1650 would give us B-frame support at the $150 price level.

[hiroo]

NVidia updated their NVenc support matrix and confirmed that the 1650's NVenc encoder does not have B-Frames support. This is unlike all of the other Turning-based GPU's they have released so far, which do support B-frames.

[Attachment 48834 - Click to enlarge]
https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix

This means that the 1650 is will not encode as well as the other Turing chips in terms of size efficiency and image quality.

Huge disappointment for those of us that were interested in this cards for encoding purposes rather than gaming.

[sneaker]

Sad.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1650-volta-nvenc,39161.html

[sophisticles]

I would be surprised if these non-RTX cards matched the RTX cards in terms of features and quality of encode. The RTX cards are said to be able to use the RTX cores for 2 specialized video processing features that have the ability to improve video quality. They also feature encoding "tunings", similar to x264/x265, for "film" and "animation", which I'm not certain that non-RTX cards feature.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want high quality hardware hevc encoding, Intel is your only bet, I have posted a number of tests in this forum using an i3 7100 (Kaby Lake) and I'm very impressed with QSV HEVC 8/10 bit encoding, Coffee Lake is supposed to be even better and it's rumored that Ice Lake is bringing a completely revamped HEVC encoding engine to QSV for even higher quality and performance.

I just realized what kind of computer you have, the specs you list is dual 10C/20T Xeons?!? X264 and X265 probably fly on that system, I see no reason to invest any money in a hardware encoder when you have a beast like that.

You may want to look into Intel's software based SVT encoders, I posted a test of SVT HEVC a while ago, that offers great quality and it's heavily optimized for multithreading and AVX-512, I know your's doesn't have AVX-512, but with 40 threads, that should chew threw encodes insanely fast.

[Zero-11]

The 1650 only has the Pascal encoder. Your best bet is to wait for Navi for the 1660 to drop in price.