Released this week, OBS Studio 29.1 adds support for AV1 encoding on GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs with the eight-generation NVENC, making 4K60 streaming available to a wider audience.

Livestreaming just got easier for OBS Studio users, as the latest version of the software adds support for the next-generation video codec, AV1. Streaming to YouTube over Enhanced RTMP with AV1 is now available. If you’re a user of NVIDIA graphics cards, you’re in for a whole new experience, as all GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs — including laptop GPUs and the recently launched GeForce RTX 4070 — support real-time AV1 hardware encoding, providing 40% more efficient encoding on average than H.264 and delivering higher quality than competing GPUs, according to NVIDIA.

AV1 allows for the reduction of the upload bandwidth needed to stream, a common limitation from streaming services and internet service providers. At higher resolutions, AV1 encoding is even more efficient. For example, AV1 enables streaming 4K at 60 frames per second with 10 Mbps upload bandwidth — down from 20 Mbps with H.264 — making 4K60 streaming available to a wider audience.

As a founding member of the Alliance for Open Media, NVIDIA has worked closely with industry titans in developing the AV1 codec. This work was necessitated by gamers and online content creators who pushed the boundaries of old formats that were defined roughly 20 years ago. The previous standard for livestreaming, H.264, usually maxed out with 1080p at 60 fps at the commonly used bitrates of 6-8 Mbps, and often produced blocky, grainy images.

OBS setup guide

AV1’s increased efficiency enables streaming higher-quality images, allowing creators to stream at higher resolutions with smoother frame rates. Even in network-limited environments, streamers can now reap the benefits of high-quality video shared with their audience.

“Support for AV1 on YouTube comes through the recent update to RTMP. The enhanced protocol also adds support for HEVC streaming, bringing new formats to users on the existing low-latency protocol they use for H.264 streaming. Enhanced RTMP ingestion has been released as a beta feature on YouTube.” writes NVIDIA’s Brian Choi in one article published on NVIDIA’s website.

Support for AV1 encoding comes through the eighth-generation NVENC, included in the GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs. A boon to streamers, NVENC offloads compute-intensive encoding tasks from the CPU to dedicated hardware on the GPU, meaning better streams and better use of NVIDIA Broadcast, part of the exclusive NVIDIA Studio suite of software that transforms any room into a home studio. Livestreams, voice chats and video calls look and sound better with powerful AI effects like eye contact, noise and room echo removal, virtual background and more.

To make the discovery of AVI in OBS Studio 29.1 easier, NVIDIA has released an OBS setup guide so you can learn how to configure OBS Studio for streaming AV1 with GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU.