A second card, 750ti or 1050/1050ti for Dedicated OBS encoding with NVENC

[mizifih]

What about adding a second card, a 750Ti, a 1050 or even a 1050Ti just for OBS encoding, so I would free my GTX 1080 just gaming. Would that work? Anyone here already did that?

I know about QuickSync, please, I don't want to sound like an a-hole, but I just wanna know about a second card for OBS encoding with NVENC.

Is it doable? Would it free the main card just for gaming?

 

[Chugalug_]

No it wouldn't work, Nvidia only allows SLI with cards that have the same core chip, aka two 1080s, two 1070s etc.
You can use a second card for PhysX, but you can't do that with OBS.

 

[mizifih]

No it wouldn't work, Nvidia only allows SLI with cards that have the same core chip, aka two 1080s, two 1070s etc.
You can use a second card for PhysX, but you can't do that with OBS.

SLI? That has no relation to what I want. You can add a second card on your PC and it will be there, to be used, somehow, you don't need to SLI or Crossfire. You can have a 1080 and use a 750 just for physx, even thou it wont do much, as Linus already tested.

How sure are you about OBS not using a second card in your system? Have you tried it? Have you read about it somewhere? Since you specifically said SLI in your reply, I'm a little skeptic about your affirmation, sorry mate.

 

[Chugalug_]

No no no no, it won't recognize as anything BUT a PhysX card if you do buy a second card that isn't identical to your primary GPU.
SLI would the best way to see any kind of benefit from using OBS, simply due to assigning primary tasks and dedicating OBS to the primary device, and the system running stuff off the second card through SLI capabilities, not the locked environment a card would have otherwise if it was different, hence why i'm mentioning that as a key term.
It is not necessarily an effective method of use, just a hypothetical way that you could potentially increase OBS encoding performance, albeit by a very miniscule amount.
Even then NVENC uses a dedicated hardware encoder separate from the rest of the processing, so getting a second GPU for encoding won't help regardless.

Don't be sorry, I explained it very poorly above, should have gone into depth. 😛

 

[mizifih]

NVENC uses a dedicated hardware encoder separate from the rest of the processing, so getting a second GPU for encoding won't help very much regardless.

And yet, in some games I notice 2 FPS drop and in others, like 15 FPS drop when I use shadowplay or OBS with NVENC... Am I missing something?

 

[Chugalug_]

That's perfectly normal, Shadowplay puts extra load on the GPU, and the encoding takes priority in the graphics card's tasks as it is the most demanding application, therefore the game will take a performance hit of sorts.

 

[mizifih]

That's perfectly normal, Shadowplay puts extra load on the GPU, and the encoding takes priority in the graphics card's tasks as it is the most demanding application, therefore the game will take a performance hit of sorts.

Well, then it's not "a dedicated hardware encoder separate from the rest of the processing", as you mentioned, since it actually use the GPU power to encode the video.

 

[Chugalug_]

....no comment.
Read up on it pls, you're kind of repeating yourself.

 

[mizifih]

....no comment.
Read up on it pls, you're kind of repeating yourself.

What I did was quote you, how using your words makes me repeat myself. You pretty much started saying Shadowplay wouldn't make any noticeable difference, then you said it's perfectly normal Shadowplay make games take second place over encoding. I mean... What is it?

Anyways, a moderator at OBS Forums said it would work in my way if I add a second GPU. Their forum is having problems right now, but, here it is:

https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/750ti-or-1050-1050ti-for-dedicated-obs-encoding-with-nvenc.58417/.

It would be kinda dumb of nvidia make their drivers force a second card to be "useless" unless you're SLIing it, but nvidia being nvidia, I really think what you said make sense, a second card being used exclusively by the system as a physx card.

I guess I'll have to try that myself since now I have people saying it works like that and people saying it doesn't (and people saying it's better if I use a second computer and buying a card is waste of money, like a 75081050 Ti would cost more then a whole system).

I'll see if I can borrow a card from someone and post whatever happens here, it's going to be hard for me though, to find someone. There's pretty much nothing about it on the web, at least nothing practical, and it sure cost less then building a second computer just for streaming and capture. If you have two Internets, OBS let you select a network interface for streaming, so it would really separate everything, internet and encode from your gaming if one have two LAN and GPUs.

 

[Chugalug_]

Never said shadowplay wouldn't result in dips etc, chill. 🙁
This is the wording that was kind of repeating yourself, hence why I was confused: "since it actually use the GPU power to encode the video." thought that'd be obvious, but wasn't sure what you meant.
The dedicated hardware encoder is part of what you refer to as the 'GPU power', it is not technically separate from the actual card, it is part of it.
Sorry for any confusion.