Handbrake and NVenc - best preconfigured settings

[grundigtom]

Dear Handbrake team,

thank you very much for including NVenc encoding into the program. You have added the following configurations when using NVenc:

- High quality
- High performance
- Fast
- Medium
- Slow
- Default

If I want to get the best out of these settings, which do I have to choose? High quality, Slow, Default? I have not played around with the manual options yet.

Thank you very much and have a nice weekend.

Tom

[mduell]

What's best to you?

For some people it's speed, for some people it's quality for size.

Regardless of what you choose, it's pretty fast and pretty [Censored] (poor quality for size).

[grundigtom]

Dear mduell,

thank you for your answer although it does not help me at all. The settings
- High Quality
- Slow
- Default
were preconfigured for a better quality out of the available settings. I guess all three settings have differetn settings I don't know. I just want to have a short explanation of the differences and the priority of these settings.

Thank you very much.

Tom

[s55]

Unfortunately, there is no available information on this. It's essentially a black box and will probably vary with hardware and driver version. So testing is the only option.

[mduell]

were preconfigured for a better quality out of the available settings. I guess all three settings have differetn settings I don't know. I just want to have a short explanation of the differences and the priority of these settings.

You should try them and observe the results.

[bionaire]

I have the latest Nvidia Drivers and a GTX 950. For me, there's no difference in quality and file size for Medium, Slow and High Quality. Default gives me a slightly lower bitrate. I can't tell if it's any better or worse. I didn't try out Fast. I think it's the same as High Performance.

I noticed the QP Constant Quality at 22 produces larger file sizes than CRF 22. So I experimented and decided that QP 26 looks pretty good and gives me a file size that's close to CRF 22 and the quality is good enough that I can't really tell any significant decrease in quality unless I pause both videos and compare them.

Overall, I'm very pleased with Handbrake including this NVEnc feature. It's a real time saver.

[MattLTH]

For what it's worth, I encoded a video with three different settings: High Quality, Slow, and Default. Both High Quality and Slow resulted in an encoding average of 258 FPS, while the Default setting scored 240 FPS. That would lead me to believe the Default setting is making more calculations during the encode and should result in a better-looking video. (Note: GPU is a GTX-1080Ti.)

After viewing the resulting videos, I feel like there are slightly better shadow and motion detail. But as was mentioned by a Mod above, it's all black box stuff; there may actually be no difference. Still, the CPU rendering (rather than any NVENC settings) still looks a bit better overall. For me, because I'm encoding the movies for professional clients who can usually see a difference, I still use the plain ol' H.264 codec set to VerySlow. Even though my main machine is an 18-core i9-7980XE running at 4.2 GHz, it's encoding at 22 FPS (considering a 2-pass encode), or in other words, 11-times slower than the HVNEC/Default configuration. With that in mind, I'll be using the NVENC codec when a fast turnaround is required.

MattLTH

[Bigo2]

Don't waste your time. I tested it hoping for reasonable results, I actually bought the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti card because of this NVEnc bull..., but comparing the resulting quality I have found that I don't have any use for it.

[nhyone]

For me, because I'm encoding the movies for professional clients who can usually see a difference, I still use the plain ol' H.264 codec set to VerySlow. Even though my main machine is an 18-core i9-7980XE running at 4.2 GHz, it's encoding at 22 FPS (considering a 2-pass encode), or in other words, 11-times slower than the HVNEC/Default configuration.

Since you already don't mind using H.264, you can try veryfast preset when speed is more important than quality.

With your 18-core CPU, you should be able to hit 100-150+ fps, so it is only half as slow.

An old post of mine: Testing how well x264 scales

On this particular test video, I could get 163 fps on 2x 10-core Xeon E5-2670 v2 @ 2.50 GHz.

As a bonus, veryfast preset often has the smallest size, rivaling that of veryslow.

[mduell]

As a bonus, veryfast preset often has the smallest size, rivaling that of veryslow.

Not at the same quality. The RF scale isn't consistent across different presets.