What is the encoder?

[Rock1m1]

Can Nvidia and AMD users will be able to use their GPU for the encoder to offload the CPU for more less performance hit? Or the CPU is currently the only encoder?

[Ollee]

That is the way other broadcasting technologies(OBS, XSplit, and such) work currently, CPU and not GPU.

Edit: So I would imagine this is currently the only way to do it.

[Rock1m1]

Ollee you might be out of tuch with those, as OBS and XSplit have support for hardware encoders of the GPUs.

[Ollee]

Touche...I'm so damned ingrained in CPU encoding due to Twitch and the like...sigh. Apoplogies.

[Rock1m1]

@Ollee Twitch has no restrictions to what encoder you use, I use NVENC and AMD VCE for encoding live streaming on Twitch all the time. Barely cuts away performance.

[Ollee]

NVENC released 2012 and AMD's VCE released 2011, are the first reliable GPU based encoders. I've been around streaming since summerish 2007. CPU is ingrained in my soul.

But I digress, you are correct Rock1m1

[Jack'lul]

They just put this feature live on beta, they will probably add support for additional encoding options later :P

[8BitCerberus]

While I appreciate the integrated streaming, if this is CPU based/software encoding that's gonna be tough on CPU dependant games, especially ones that are already pushing one's system to the limits. Fortunately most games are GPU dependant these days, so the problem should be minimal. But I'd still like to see this support Nvenc, VCE, and QuickSync, CPU encoding should ideally only be a fallback if there are no hardware encoding options available. I've been using QuickSync and Nvenc in OBS and they work like a charm.

And adding support for direct streaming to Twitch or YouTube would be great, or at the very least a way to export the stream to YouTube or even just to the HDD.