Having a good video codec inside the graphics card’s GPU is essential. Especially if you dedicate yourself to streaming, since this small processor that occupies a very limited area of said chip is in charge of generating the video that is transmitted through platforms such as Twitch or YouTube while you play. Well, in the Radeon the coding has been improved. doIt’s enough for streaming to be better on AMD than on NVIDIA Or will things continue as before?
In the era in which the broadcast of content over the internet is a massive mass phenomenon, it is paradoxical that video capture devices are not the most used type of hardware to capture our games and broadcast them live over the internet. Rather, they are the graphics cards, which, thanks to their processors in charge of encoding and decoding video, can perform this function. However, this is not exempt from certain limitations, especially in the case of AMD hardware, where it starts with a great disadvantage compared to NVIDIA.
Is it better to stream with AMD or NVIDIA graphics?
The biggest Achilles heel that AMD has to popularize its Radeon graphics cards is streaming, the most popular content creators on Twitch and YouTube use competing graphics cards. The reason? NVIDIA GPUs are better for video encoding and streaming. What makes that when buying a new PC, young and not so young viewers receive the message that the hardware to buy in this case is the green brand.
For example, a problem that AMD had been dragging for a long time is the quality of your encoding algorithm. As you can see in the graph above these lines for a long time it was better to have a good CPU and use X264 through the central processor than not the graphics card encoder. Not only that, but in this respect AMD’s VCN codec is not only behind NVIDIA’s NVENC, but also Intel’s QuickSync.
Nevertheless, AMD has recently introduced the use of so-called B-Frames during the encoding process. These types of frames take the information from the next and previous frame to create an intermediate one. To do this, it is based on the knowledge of where the objects are in both frames to calculate their speed and position in the new one. However, it is still below even the Intel codec.
| codec | Score (out of 100) |
|---|---|
| NVIDIA NVENC | 96.13 |
| Intel QuickSync | 96.37 |
| AMD’s AMF (B-Frames) | 94 |
| AMD’s AMF (No B-Frames) | 92 |
Waiting for application support
At the moment, the new AMD codec does not have support in the applications used for streaming, although apparently the image quality has improved a lot and could have finally made the AMD Radeon viable as an option to consider. in order to broadcast on Twitch or YouTube. Which would completely break NVIDIA’s years of monopoly in this field.
Why does streaming resist Radeon?
The coding work is carried out by a microcontroller, which is located inside the GPU and is responsible for recursively executing a program that is located in its internal RAM memory. Every time we are going to play video on our graphics card, what the driver does is load said program into memory so that it knows how to play or encode said content. In theory there should be no difference between the two brands, however, there is.
The reason for this has to do with one of the problems that AMD has been dragging for a long time, which has to do with all the software that is used to support its hardware. Something in which NVIDIA has a great advantage. And it is that you only have to compare the quality of the drivers of your rival with yours. They are day and night and despite the attempts of Lisa Su’s to improve, the fact of having fewer resources than their rivals makes them use them in other points that they consider more important.
In any case, and in conclusion we repeat what we have told you before, it is relevant for streaming that both AMD and NVIDIA have good graphics cards. From time to time the Ibai, the Auronplay or the TheGref on duty show their equipment and as long as they continue to have a GeForce RTX, the Radeon RX will not break the mental quota.
