Figuring out the best way to encode a video is very computationally expensive, and it might not a good idea to throw a ton of CPU cycles at encoding video when you’re running a game. That’s why modern GPUs usually include hardware video encoders.

Here, we’ll take a brief look at how some implementations compare. We’ll be using Netflix’s Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) metric to evaluate quality.

Most of our commentary will focus on AMD and Nvidia’s latest encoders, in RDNA 2 (VCN, Video Core Next) and Turing (NVENC) respectively. I don’t have an Ampere card unfortunately. We’ll be using the H.264 codec too, because it’s very well supported.