OBS Studio version 29.1 is now out in beta, and there's a big feature coming with it. As announced by Nvidia, this latest release supports AV1 encoding with streaming to YouTube. This can result in boosted image quality and reduced bitrate by up to 40% without sacrificing image quality for better streaming at higher resolutions and framerates when sharing your in-game action live with friends.

For streamers, this is huge news, even if things are in beta. AV1 support allows streaming at 4K resolution at 60 frames per second with a 10 Mbps upload bandwidth. This is actually an improvement for what you'd get with traditional H.264 streaming, since it's down from the 20 Mbps upload bandwidth, opening higher streaming quality to more people. On the hardware side of things, meanwhile, Nvidia claims that when paired with GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, you can get up to 50% more efficient encoding with AV1. This is because these GPUs have the eight-generation NVENC (NVIDIA Encoder), which offloads encoding during streaming from the CPU to the GPU. Check out some performance claims in the graphic below for how AV1 encoding impacts streaming at other resolutions.

If you're eager to get started with this feature today, you can check out the dedicated setup guide that's been put together by the folks at OBS. Keep in mind that you'll have to download a beta version of OBS which means you may experience instability and bugs with both OBS and YouTube in this initial release. The initial setup process requires picking the highest resolution supported on YouTube, copying a Steam Key, going to the Advanced tab in OBS, and picking NVIDIA NVENC AV1. From there, you can choose the higher bitrate (10000 Kbps), and bandwidth settings, choose your video settings, and start your stream. If you'd like, you also can check the stream quality by selecting Stats for Nerds on the YouTube stream on another device to confirm the benefits that come with AV1 encoding.