OBS Studio supports AV1 encoding on RTX 4000 cards

Open Broadcaster Studio, or OBS, has added support for Nvenc AV1 encoding for Nvidia RTX 4000 cards. For the time being, this only works for recording images and not yet for streaming, because services such as YouTube and Twitch do not yet support the codec.

The support comes with version 28.1 of the software. It’s on Tuesday officially released after a beta came out earlier. The release notes show how the Nvenc AV1 hardware encoder is supported on Windows. There are still limitations; for example, there is no rescaling in the advanced output mode and the tool only works in the color formats NV12 and P010. The codec only works on GeForce RTX 4000 video cards from Nvidia. The RTX 4080 and 4090 both have dual AV1 encoders on board.

Previous generations of Nvidia GPUs only supported AV1 decoding, but no encoding. The AV1 encoder is about 40 percent more efficient than the H.264 encoder in the RTX 3000 series and 30 percent more efficient than H.265 encoding. Users can stream it in 1440p, among other things, but in practice the usability will still be disappointing. The major streaming platforms such as YouTube and Twitch do not yet support the codec.