nVidia 900 series - improved NVENC, will Steam use the extra features?

[Ualdazan]

With the nVIdia 900 series, Maxwell 3rd generation, I've read they support a much much higher encoding bit-rate and also support HEVC. Does Steam have to be updated to support higher encoding bit-rates or will it automatically notice the GPU is able to encode at a higher quality and automatically use it? Likewise, will Steam have to be changed to use HEVC, or does it just ask the nVidia driver to do the work and then the nVidia driver gets to pick if it wants to use h.264 or HEVC?

[Martelol]

Steam will need to be updated to make use of HEVC, and I imagine at some point it will be.

You can already force a higher bitrate by setting the client to "beautiful" instead of balanced in the streaming settings. Higher bitrate also results in higher latency though, so it's not necessarily something you should expect to see happen.