[Neillithan]

NVENC gets that speed by having terrible quality at reasonable bitrates. If it did respect your bitrate limit the quality would be terrible for the noisy parts.

I suppose you're probably right about that. When I chose constant bitrate at 10,000, the noisy part did look quite terrible. However, I saw the bitrate climb up to upwards of 30-40,000 for the noisy part... which is just absurd. If NVENC would respect my maximum bitrate and cap it at 16000 or 20000, the result would be acceptable I think.

Using NVENC twice in one workflow is a terrible idea, generational quality loss is very high with NVENC.

I'm aware of this.

Why don't you simply capture to the final format if you need to use NVENC?

Because, the idea is to capture the game footage at a *very* high bitrate (NVENC H264) and then downconvert to a lower bitrate, better codec (HEVC NVENC).

The initial process takes place on the GPU using Nvidia Geforce Experience, which results in an unnoticeable performance impact.

If I just simply captured the footage at (NVENC H.264) at 5000-10000 bitrate, it would look like balls by comparison to the "workflow" I've chosen. As far as I can tell, Geforce Experience does not capture at (NVENC HEVC, it only captures in NVENC H264), which kinda sucks.

You should be able to run x264 software encoding for a much better game capture compared to NVENC HEVC

x264 will *always* be better than (NVENC H264) or (NVENC HEVC), undoubtedly, but the performance impact takes place on the CPU, which is something you generally do not want if you're playing a game and trying to capture at 60fps. I realize lots of people do this on Twitch, but in my experience, there's a *very* noticeable performance impact (mostly noticeable with mouse lag, or some kind of input delay as a result) and BELIEVE me when I say this, I have spent *countless* hours over the years tweaking OBS and reading and trying every possible combination of settings. Geforce Experience for recording gameplay footage is simply unbeatable in terms of performance. The way twitch users get around this problem is by having a second computer dedicated to the realtime 60fps x264 encoding.... Unfortunately for me, I don't have a 2nd PC lying around to dedicate for realtime encoding.

, then reencode that with x265 for much improved quality, if a lot slower.

Just about the only thing I agree with here..... I just wish that NVENC HEVC wouldn't dedicate 30,000 bitrate to a 0.5s noisy scene, resulting in a massive sync delay / framerate dip during playback. It seems so silly and easy to prevent.... yet no value I input for max bitrate seems to have any effect. Unfortunate.

I've contacted the author of Xmedia Recode to report this bug, but as usual, he never responds to my e-mails and I'll be lucky if he fixes it (if that's even possible).