NVENC vs. X264 — Does CPU or RTX GPU encoding work best for Twitch?

If you want to livestream to Twitch, Mixer, or YouTube Live, you’ve had two options when it comes to video encoding. You can set your CPU to do software encoding. You could alternatively select your Nvidia GPU to handle that task. Each of these have their benefits, but your best bet was to use your CPU. But with Nvidia’s new RTX video cards, that may have changed.

CPU versus GPU encoding was traditionally about quality versus performance. Livestreaming requires you to compress a video broadcast into a small amount of bandwidth. Twitch has a maximum upload speed of 6 Mbps, which isn’t a lot when you need to encode 60 frames of 1080p video every second. But X264 is efficient at smushing visual details into that tiny space. The problem is that if you’re running a game on the same system, CPU encoding is going to hurt performance.