Spare GPU usable to stream?

[ZHU92]

Just got a used gtx 1080 for cheap locally and I have my rx 570 4gb model still. I'm wondering if there's any reason to keep it as a secondary gpu in the system (for rendering/streaming to help offload from the cpu if that's even a thing?!) or should I just sell it off locally and get some dosh back. My cpu is an i5 8600k clocked at 4ghz currently with 16gb ddr4 2400 ram and it can stream/record/play games like overwatch no problem but my only concern is playing an unoptimized game or cpu heavy game my i5 wont be able to keep up with just 6 threads and all that load. Thanks in advance!

 

[camieabz]

You could build a cheap system around it and have a second streaming / rendering rig, if streaming is likely.

 

[TechyInAZ]

Yes actually you can use that dedicated GPU for pure raw hardware encoding and not get a performance hit by doing it on the main GPU. However, you can also use the IGPU (quicksync) to encode aswell. Tho, I think the RX 570 would encode better, last time I used quicksync was like 5 years ago with a sandy bridge IGPU. Not sure if quicksync has gotten a lot better or not in terms of reliability.

 

[TJ Hooker]

The GTX 1080 has a dedicated hardware encoder as well, I don't know how much difference it'd make trying to offload it onto a different card.

 

[TechyInAZ]

Not large, according to Nvidia, they say that NVEC or ShadowPlay is roughly a 5-10% performance hit, but that was a few years ago so maybe the newer hardware encoders are different? idk.

But, what I don't like about GPU encoding is that it's efficiency per bit isn't as good as dedicated capture cards and CPU x264 encoding. It's not horribly bad, but it is slightly noticeable.

But, this is only when your streaming. With recording you can get away with this because you can just increase the bitrate to a stupidly high amount like 2x-5x what's required and then let either your video editor or youtube downsample that to normal bitrates which will look better cause those pieces of software can afford to use more power to make everything look sharper and very efficient at the same time. (where as with NVEC, it's a small hardware encoder, so it doesn't have enough resources or time to make an image look just as good as x264, however it does come really close for how small it is.)

 

[mgallo848]

I could be wrong but I thought the majority of the workload for streaming was on the CPU? Wouldn't it make more sense to sell the 570 and use it towards a video capture card?

https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=video+capture+card&ignorear=0&N=-1&isNodeId=1

I believe that would be the best way to go.

 

[maddogfargo]

OBS and MSI Afterburner can capture video using GPU hardware. If you want to use the AMD card for hardware capture/encoding/streaming, you need to look at how to install support for AMD AMF. This works fine for capture in MSI Afterburner and should also work in OBS for streaming. I think Steam streaming even supports it.

 

[TechyInAZ]

I could be wrong but I thought the majority of the workload for streaming was on the CPU? Wouldn't it make more sense to sell the 570 and use it towards a video capture card?

https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=video+capture+card&ignorear=0&N=-1&isNodeId=1

I believe that would be the best way to go.

Your thinking of x264 encoding which does everything on the CPU. GPU encoding like NVEC do 90% of all the work on the GPU, only a fraction of the CPU is used at all (CPU transfers the data that's rendered to either the internet or storage device, then I think the CPU does audio encoding, don't quote me on that tho).