NVENC - Bitrate Plateau

NOTE: Unsure of what the proper tag for this is... There's somewhat of a category gap when it comes to video production, which is quite ironic since the forums essentially have the L1T YouTube channel at its heart...

OBS FTW

I'm using OBS on Manjaro 17 with an i5 4400, GTX 745, and 16GB of DDR3.
Go fuck yourself

NVENC is shit, I know.

I'm going to start off by saying that I know that CPU x264 is going to yield better quality overall, but at a higher cost to performance. NVENC is going to lighten the load on my CPU at the cost of quality and even more so, the cost of filesize.
You're a cunt

Bitrate OVER 9000!

In all honesty, bitrate is the primary concern here. With NVENC, I can push the bitrate to an insane amount with absolutely no impact to performance whereas H264 will fuck shit hard. My question is in regards to the plateau point, where NVENC bitrate will no longer yield any quality improvements and just become a monster for disk space. I've been throwing sliders up and down, but I'm sure there's specs on this? I've currently got the bitrate at 28,000 and have not noticed any improvement at 48,000 whereas H264 will be significantly clearer at 48,000 and even more so at 72,000 bitrate. Resolution@1080p 48FPS btw.

TFW you're insulting your readers and only source for help.

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So I do not have a lot of direct experience with NVENC as Im normally able to just run everything on CPU encode but from having researched for work and learning how certain streaming services work if you are planing to upload or live stream here is what I have learned.

NVENC does not do a great job at capturing detail at the Input phase of things. It will always look worse than the CPU based x264 or AMD ReLive or Intel Quick Sync. In terms of data rate your point of diminishing returns will be one of two places If you are trying to push to a streaming service then pushing a higher data rate than their max streaming data rate will be that point of diminishing return. The reason for this is that once you start pushing over that data rate they will have to reencode down to their max data rate before pushing anything live and that will mean you will lose quality from the streaming services reencode.

In terms of for recording based off your experience you have found your points of diminishing returns for the encoding settings you are using.