How do I force my nvidia card to use hardware encoding for steam link?

[Olverine]

I bought the steam link on the winter sale and I was really impressed of how well it performed. At that time, I used a AMD HD 7790 graphics card temporarily since my gtx 970 was broken. I played games at 60 fps on the beautiful settings with no significant latency and it was awesome. Then I got my gtx 970 back and when I plugged it in to my computer and tried playing on the link, I could not get more than 30 fps and the latency was horrible. I finally managed to get the latency down by changing some settings in the nvidia control panel, but my framerate is still really bad.

I did some research and found that the hardware encoding on nvidia cards is sometimes beign used by features like shadowplay and therefore, can not be used by in-home streaming. I disabled shadowplay and nvidia gamestream but my framerate did not improve. I have the "use hardware encoding" setting in steam turned on but I suspect that it still uses software encoding.

Could someone tell me how to know if in-home streaming uses software or hardware encoding and how to make sure the hardware encoding is being used?

[Xjph]

Turn on the performance details in the Steam link settings, it will list the encoder being used when you connect. If you see NVENC displayed then it's using the nvidia hardware encoder.

[Olverine]

Originally posted by Vithigar:

Turn on the performance details in the Steam link settings, it will list the encoder being used when you connect. If you see NVENC displayed then it's using the nvidia hardware encoder.

Ok, so it says "Steam D3D10 NV12 + NVENC H264" so I guess this means that the hardware encoder is in fact in use. Does this mean I'm out of options or do you know anything else I could try?

If I can't get a better framerate, I'll probably never use the link again which would be really sad.

[Xjph]

Are there any warnings like "slow encode" (or slow anything else) displayed when you enable the performance stats? Did you try disabling hardware encoding to see if maybe software encoding will work better? Having a performance hit like that using NVENC is certainly not normal though.

[Olverine]

Originally posted by Vithigar:

Are there any warnings like "slow encode" (or slow anything else) displayed when you enable the performance stats? Did you try disabling hardware encoding to see if maybe software encoding will work better? Having a performance hit like that using NVENC is certainly not normal though.

I get the slow encode warning sometimes when loading a game using hardware encoder but never while playing. Using software encoding seemed to work a tiny bit better but not good enough.

[Olverine]

Ok, so I did all my testing in Dirt 3, which ran poorly, and assumed that the link capped me at about 30 fps since that was reported in steam big picture as well. However, I decided to try some other games and found that some actually seem to run smooth as a baby butt! The games I've tested so far are:

30fps:

• Dirt 3
  
• Distance (Which I would really like to play on the link )
  
• The mean greens (ran at like 10 fps for some reason)
  
• Aqua Moto racing: Utopia

60fps:

• Portal 2
  
• Left 4 Dead 2
  
• Rocket Leauge
  
• Serious Sam 3
  
• Vanishing of ethan carter Redux

This makes me very happy, but the AMD card could stream all my games at 60fps which I greatly prefered.

I should also mention that all these games run at a solid 60 fps on the host machine.

[Balancer]

You need to see NVFBC during gameplay (doesn't matter what shows up when your in Big Picture). Otherwise you'll get 30fps in graphically intensive games.

There was a bug in Steam, that was fixed about a month ago, that prevented NVFBC from being used. It should be fixed in the latest version, but maybe it's only been fixed in the beta version of Steam. If you are not on Steam beta, I suggest you try that.

Also, I think you need to have Shadowplay enabled. I'm pretty sure I do.
Also, you need to have the NVFBC option checked (turned on) under the Client Options in Steam Link.

[Fraggoso]

I hope it's okay to sneak into this tread as I'm having almost the same problem.

Yesterday I received my Link and I get the NVENC with the detailed graph and games runs very good. Still I wanted to know why everyone is talking about NVFBC.
I never saw that in any Games I tried.

Games from Origin, like Dragon Age Inq, only run in DWM + NVENC and can't maintain 60 FPS which bugs me as Dragon Age Inq was the Game I wanted to play the most (tried frickling with it for more than 2 hours yesterday).

Also my Big Picture only runs at 20 FPS after I reinstalled my driver + installing GeForce Exp (which I didn't as I hated it and never used Shadowplay etc...).
Is there any way to improve that or force NVFBC?

I'm using the betas right now.

My Rig:
Intel i7 4790k
16 GB Ram
1080 GTX

[Malhavoc]

@Fraggoso: I'm not 100% sure, but I think that NVFBC is mainly a thing of the past now. If you have an NVidia card like me, you always get NVENC when going hardware encoding. You could also try to switch to software encoding: it burdens the CPU more, but someone even says he gets better results, and less compression.

In the on-screen details, the part left of the "+" is instead the capturing method. And DWM is the one used for desktop if I'm not wrong, and it's quite suboptimal. I'm not sure why you get that instead of better ones, but it may be tied to how you run the game (don't have Origin games: I know there are issue and ways around them, maybe your aren't using the optimal way, but I can't help you on this).

[Olverine]

Originally posted by Balancer:

I think you need to have Shadowplay enabled.

I renabled shadowplay and found that NVFBC was used for some games. But it did not seem to affect my experience in any way.

[Fraggoso]

Originally posted by Malhavoc:

@Fraggoso: I'm not 100% sure, but I think that NVFBC is mainly a thing of the past now. If you have an NVidia card like me, you always get NVENC when going hardware encoding. You could also try to switch to software encoding: it burdens the CPU more, but someone even says he gets better results, and less compression.

In the on-screen details, the part left of the "+" is instead the capturing method. And DWM is the one used for desktop if I'm not wrong, and it's quite suboptimal. I'm not sure why you get that instead of better ones, but it may be tied to how you run the game (don't have Origin games: I know there are issue and ways around them, maybe your aren't using the optimal way, but I can't help you on this).

It really only happens to origin Games...
I tried adding my whole uplay library and they first start with DWM + ... and after the game loaded completely it changes to D3DXX NVENC and buttersmooth.

Stupid origin! >_<

[Balancer]

Originally posted by Parabol:

Originally posted by Balancer:

I think you need to have Shadowplay enabled.

I renabled shadowplay and found that NVFBC was used for some games. But it did not seem to affect my experience in any way.

Strange, I guess there's something else going on. For me, there is a huge difference between NVENC and NVFBC in graphically intensive games (30 fps with NVENC and 60 fps with NVFBC).