Prefer NVFBC?

[Helvetesdorr]

I've been searching all over the web for hours yet couldn't find a definitive recent answer (which matters since everything seems to change pretty quickly with IHS). Should I enable NVFBC in game options or not? I have an i5 3450 paired with a GTX 970 and I'm still not sure which encoding method I'm supposed to use in this situation for the best picture quality with a wired Link.

[Jynx]

I don't have the worlds best answer, but I'll describe up to what I know so far:

- It really depends on your rig, your network, and your game. Play with settings, see what works for you.

Older hardware tends to favor NVENC/NVIFR, but FBC does a better job capturing the full screen (specifically to games that run in "windowed fullscreen").

I just did a quick test-run, pertaining to this question, of a few games on my rig (g3258@4ghz/8gb@1400mhz9t/760oem@1ghz ; wired to a link also; Bioshock2/Infinte/Rocket League/A Story about my Uncle) and across the board my rig perferred FBC NOT preferred, slightly better frames per second, and around 15ms less latency (which makes a big deal if overall latency is around 40-50) and I was still almost riding 1080p60/beautiful with little issue. At 900p60/Balenced I can turn on SweetFX/HBAO, and average less than 30ms (FXAA helps alot if you're streaming at a lower resolution than native). When I was rocking a GTX 650, IFR ran far better than FBC; scaling up to a 970, I'd assume the difference would be insignificant in contrast.

Short answer, you might have to play with some settings: play a game for 2-3 minutes, make sure you're running detailed info, and see what gets better FPS and lower MS. FBC SHOULD be the right choice for your rig, but you'll never know until you run your own benchmarks.

[Helvetesdorr]

Thanks for taking the time to do some tests and posting a detailed response, I really appreciate it! I'm going to spend some time benchmarking all the options tonight and see what works best.

So far average latency for me has been around 15-25 ms which feels pretty good - in Dark Souls 3 I don't feel any kind of delay at all. It shot up to 45-50 when I tried QuickSycn encoding though.

From my first tests with the Link I couldn't really see any difference with FBC on or off, but apparently I have to enable shadowplay in Geforce Experience for it to work at all? By the way, so far this is the only thing that actually frustrates me about the Link (and anything Valve-related to an extent) - it's just so damn hard to figure out how stuff actually works and which option does what! They really should add some tooltips for the various options or at least include them in an up-to-date manual of some sort.

[Jynx]

No thanks needed, I just so happened to whip out my steam link that very same night, and upgraded to Windows 10 (eh), needed to do some testing. I also found that the less demanding settings I used, the more ENC and FBC seemed to perform the same. Me and my friend played ASAMU, full title above, for over an hour last night on the link, ran fantastic, even with a ton of extra stuff layered on. Oh and 15ms? I'm jealous =P.

I've read in some cases to get FBC working you need to enable shadowplay (you can set it to manuel, doesn't matter) I had to do this about a year back, but I've noticed more recently thats not the case anymore. Just make sure you have stats running on the link, hit F6 (or start+y), and if you see NVFBC as the encoder, you're golden. It already sounds like you are however.

DONT USE QUICKSYNC, the idea of using the unused gpu inside your cpu seems like a fantastic choice.... until you see how much worse it performs. Pity, it would be nice to liberate the main GPU and use the intergrated for something besides, well, nothing. I always though dedicated encoding hardware would be a smart product for Valve to market, but if future GPUs stream that well, I'm not going to worry.

As far as lack of manual, would be nice if they had better online documentation, but for what it's worth, you should have no problem streaming even the most demanding games

[Helvetesdorr]

So i've been trying various configurations for a couple of days in Dark Souls 3, and at least for this game it seems that NVENC is a little bit better than FBC. FBC has a bit higher latency and tends to spike at times, while NVENC is always silky-smooth and provides stable 15-20ms of delay (25ms at the busiest moments).

So far I'm happy with this setup, especially after changing the TV's hdmi input name to PC (that's some Samsung voodoo that's even better than game mode). My only minor gripe is that you can still see it's an encode, but I understand it's hardly ever going to look 1:1 compared to gameplay on PC.

EDIT: I'm also curious if any settings related to video quality in Nvidia control panel affect streaming, but once again couldn't find any answers on this topic =(

[Didgeridoom]

Within NVIDIA control panel under 3D settings-- setting maximum pre-rendered frames to 1 and turning on Adaptive vertical sync (and disabling V-sync on in-game settings) helped lower my display latency