We have talked many times about the graphics cards They are used for much more than playing video games. What’s more, we have a report reviewing all the uses that a GPU has today. Undoubtedly, the work of these in our current world is key.
And to check which of the current graphics cards are best for encoding, a very typical activity for Youtubers, cameras and other audiovisual professionals, an American medium wanted to test the latest releases of AMD, Intel and NVIDIA.
Here today we are going to focus specifically on the performance and quality of video encoding that you can expect from various generations of GPUs. In general, video encoder/decoders of each generation offer the same performance, with minor variations.
But, nobody until now has set out to take a bunch of graphics cards and compare them with each other, thus seeing who is the king of video encoding and what. GPUs It is the one that rents the most in terms of quality / price. Thanks to Tom’s Hardware today we know the answer.
Video encoding showdown between AMD, Intel and NVIDIA
After running and re-running the various encodings several times, the result they obtained is quite unevenhe. Despite all the talk about AV1 encoding, in practice it doesn’t differ at all from HEVC.
The only real advantage is that AV1 is supposedly royalty-free, but if you’re archiving your own movies you can still use HEVC and you won’t miss a thing. AV1 may take over in the future, just as H.264 became the de facto video standard for the past decade or more.
From an overall quality and performance point of view, NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace NVENC architecture graphics cards come out on top, but right now it’s only available on GPUs starting at $900 (the RTX 4070 Ti).
Over time it should arrive in the 4060 and 4050 variantswhich are already shipping in laptops, though there’s one major caveat: 40-series cards with 12GB or more of VRAM have dual NVENC blocks, while other models will only have a single encoder block, which could mean roughly half performance.
Just behind NVIDIA in terms of quality and performance, the Intel Arc GPUs they also offer great quality and performance for streaming. They are the last to arrive, but they do a good job.
On the part of AMD, these are still behind the competition. The RDNA 3-based RX 7900 cards offer the highest-quality encodes we’ve seen on an AMD GPU to date, but that’s not saying much.
In fact, quality and performance is about on par with what you could get from a GTX 1000 series GPU back in 2016 (except no AV1 support, naturally, since that didn’t exist then).
Again you can see how NVIDIA has used its dominant position in the graphics card market to enhance and improve all the tools around the use of these. That is why they are the ones that are best positioned in raytracing, rescaling, artificial intelligence, coding, etc.