The recent release of OBS Studio 29.1 adds a much appreciated support for AV1 encoding. Owners of GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs are in a treat as NVIDIA’s 8th generation NVENC (NVIDIA Encoder) are baked into the platform to fully support it.
With GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, NVIDIA reports that it is up to 50% more efficient compared to encoding on H.264 and 40% better on average visuals.
AV1 is hailed as the new gold standard, with focus on efficiency and quality compared to older H.264, H.265 and even the VP9 format. It is the most recent royalty-free video encoder standardized by the Alliance for Open Media.
Now the efficiency brought by AV1 reduces the upload bandwidth needed to stream, a common limitation from streaming services and internet service providers. For example, AV1 enables streaming 4K at 60 frames per second with 10 Mbps upload bandwidth which is down from 20 Mbps requirement with H.264. That makes 4K 60 FPS streaming available to a wider audience.
