A common question we hear from users trying to set up streaming to the Quest is what video cards they should use. The easy answer is: Whatever card you have. In general, the stronger the card the better. And while some cards have better performance than others or can be used with certain tools that others can’t, overall it does not make sense at this point in time to buy a GPU specifically with streaming in mind.

That said, there are a few caveats.

NVENC and VCE

Since low latency is critical, almost all VR streaming solutions rely on the built-in hardware encoder that is part of modern GPUs. Encoding frames on the CPU simply adds too much latency to the encoding. Nvidia cards should therefore support NVENC and AMD cards should support VCE.

On Nvidia’s Side

NVENC is supported by all GTX and RTX class Nvidia GPUs with the RTX cards performing marginally better and supporting BFrames which can lead to visual improvements. But in short, any Nvidia GPU that you can buy or already own that is powerful enough to run a VR game has the required hardware for stream encoding on it.

On AMD’s Side

Similar to the situation over at Nvidia, AMD cards have supported VCE for many years. Any card produced after 2012 is built with it, meaning that if your card is strong enough to run a VR game, it has the capability to stream it.

Okay, okay, it doesn’t matter, but what if I HAD to choose?

Choose the more powerful card. If you can get a more powerful card on sale, then that is the one you should be getting. NVENC vs VCE performance is small and changes all the time. Tools used to be heavily geared towards Nvidia cards but that advantage has all but evaporated in the past weeks. All major streaming solutions support Nvidia and AMD cards at the time of writing with some minor caveats such as lacking Windows 7 support for some combinations.

Your GPU is the most important part of your streaming setup. It must be strong enough to run the game at a good speed and resolution and it must also be able to encode the video on the fly. But brands do no longer play a significant role.

So what’s the BEST card?

The strongest one on the market right now. At this point in time, that is a Nvidia RTX 2080ti but things change. Also, you absolutely do not need a 2080ti to get playable results.

So what card do I need at minimum?

That depends on the game you are playing. Something light like Skyrim or Super Hot will work just fine on a GTX 970 or Radeon 290. Those two cards are generally considered the weakest usable cards when it comes to VR in general.