With video codecs you often set a target bitrate.
So no matter the resolution and fps, you’ll barely be able to get past them.
Below is of course possible if, for example, no further information is really needed to transfer the picture perfectly.
Either way, the question is obviously whether you would need more bandwidth at higher FPS in order not to compromise image quality.
With various Mpeg-like codecs, however, it’s not that bad.
Doubling the frame rate certainly doesn’t require doubling the bandwidth to get the same image quality.
This is because with the Mpeg-like codec you partially describe the image as a piece in the image that moves. Whether you make that translation with 2 intermediate steps, or 20 so to speak, it doesn’t matter.
The only thing you need to add is information about which pixels you need to polish to fix errors against. delete the original. That part depends on the frame rate.
However, the upside is that in smaller passes you probably have to “clean up” fewer pixels per pass, so doubling the frame rate doesn’t immediately mean losing twice as much data as well.
For video compression it is necessary to analyze the images to calculate the displacement vectors and the intermediate images to mask the errors.
This takes at least a few frames of encoding time, which causes lag, and you don’t want that with games.
The advantage NVidia has here is that they already know at a very low level what those shift vectors are, since they’re already given to the video card by the game.
This not only saves time in the sense that no latency is added, but also that you have more information on how best to compress the video to put as little information as possible in the intervening frames to avoid mask rendering errors.
In short, due to this unique use case, the difference in the additional data required at a higher frame rate could be quite significant, and they could get away with basically the same bit rate as before.
And maybe they’ll also use the AV1 codec, which would actually take less bandwidth for the same image quality, or more space with the same bandwidth for better image quality. I’m just wondering if users using this service have hardware powerful enough to play AV1 smoothly.
