Technical
NVENC
NVIDIA's dedicated encoding chip on GeForce GPUs. Streams with almost zero game performance cost — the default choice if you have RTX.
Related terms
- Encoder
The software or hardware that compresses your video to send it online. 'x264' uses your CPU; 'NVENC' uses an NVIDIA GPU.
- x264
Software encoding on your CPU. Its slower presets can beat hardware quality, but cost serious CPU — mostly a dual-PC-setup choice now.
- AV1
The newest open codec: dramatically better compression, no licensing fees. RTX 40-series+ GPUs encode it; platform support is growing fast.