OBS Studio Adds NVENC AV1 Hardware Encoder Support With NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Graphics Cards

OBS Studio has announced its latest version which adds support for NVENC AV1 Hardware encoder on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards including the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 pack dual AV1 Encoders which can significantly reduce overhead and offer better-quality encoding.

Ada GPUs take streaming and video content to the next level, incorporating support for AV1 video encoding in the Ada eighth-generation dedicated hardware encoder (known as NVENC). Prior generation Ampere GPUs supported AV1 decoding but not encoding.

Ada’s AV1 encoder is 40% more efficient than the H.264 encoder used in GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs. AV1 will enable users who are streaming at 1080p today to increase their stream resolution to 1440p while running at the same bitrate and quality, or for users with 1080p displays, streams will look similar to 1440p, providing better quality.

Added NVENC AV1 hardware encoder on Windows

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

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 determining 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.

You can download the latest version of OBS Studio here to take advantage of AV1 encoding on your NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series graphics card.