News Nvidia Lifts Some Video Encoding Limitations from Consumer GPUs

[Admin]

Nvidia increases concurrent NVENC encodes on consumer GPUs to five.

Nvidia Lifts Some Video Encoding Limitations from Consumer GPUs : Read more

 

[Giroro]

This makes yesterday's news that the "RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation" only supports 2 NVENC streams even more confusing. Unless that news was about the number of NVENC/NVDEC hardware codecs, not the max number of streams.

Nvidia's motivation to increase the limit probably stems from how windows's generally-unused gaming/stream recording features are usually camping on one of the NVEC streams, but OBS needs 2 streams if you want to run a live stream and record game footage at the same time.
So maybe they finally realized that they are selling "ultimate game streaming" cards that need to be hacked/fully-unlocked actually run a game stream.
Knowing Nvidia, step 2 will be to prevent their most-influential celebrity customers from unlocking full use of the hardware built into their "bargain bin" $2000 RTX 4090.
Step 3, maybe they'll start bricking hacked cards, when they think they can get away with it.

 

[AtrociKitty]

This is an improvement, but 5 streams is still artificially limiting most cards. Here's a nice tool to show how many streams various Nvidia cards can actually handle.

In addition to streaming, many people use Nvidia cards for transcoding work in home media servers. I have an RTX 3060 12GB in mine, which can theoretically handle 10 simultaneous 4k to 1080p transcodes per the tool above. That means the increased limit of 5 is still cutting performance in half.

Unlocking this full NVENC performance is really easy, because it's only a driver limitation (you don't need to "hack" the card). I'm not going to repost the instructions here, but the entire process is patching a single DLL. I get that Nvidia wants to maintain market segmentation, but it's still dumb that they're doing it in such an artificial way when the hardware is capable of much more.

 

[Giroro]

Possible correction: Nvidia's Decode matrix does not list a maximum number of sessions for Decode, So unsure if they limit the number of sessions for decoding.

 

[alquix]

This will make my Plex server happy

 

[BX4096]

Is that a driver-based update for old hardware, or does it only apply to new one?

 

[ThisIsMe]

Likely they realized how limited their consumer cards and some pro cards were in this area compared to the Intel A series cards. They are less expensive, produce nearly identical quality (+/- depending on various options), close in performance, and no artificial limits.

Some of the crazy video streaming servers that have been built with Intel cards are wild.

 

[trebory6]

So I made an account just to point this out, but if you google it, there are driver patches on GitHub that remove the encoding session limitations on consumer Nvidia cards.

Patch gets removed every driver update, so you have to re-apply it every time you update the driver. Might void warranties, but if you're unconcerned with that and need the unrestricted video processing power, then there you go.

Personally I think artificially restricting the hardware that I paid for is extremely anti-consumer and a very dirty and greedy tactic by a company, so I have no qualms sharing this information. It's not even for safety or card integrity purposes but literally just for monetary gain so people will pay more for professional cards.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Possible correction: Nvidia's Decode matrix does not list a maximum number of sessions for Decode, So unsure if they limit the number of sessions for decoding.

Edited this out now. I'm not sure where Anton got the "one decoding session max" idea from. All you have to do is open up eight YouTube windows to see that's not true. ¯\(ツ)/¯

 

[Giroro]

Edited this out now. I'm not sure where Anton got the "one decoding session max" idea from. All you have to do is open up eight YouTube windows to see that's not true. ¯\(ツ)/¯

In fairness, it's easy to conflate the number of hardware blocks with the number of sessions. I do it occasionally too.

 

[RedBear87]

So I made an account just to point this out, but if you google it, there are driver patches on GitHub that remove the encoding session limitations on consumer Nvidia cards

Unless the page was quietly updated later this was mentioned in the article, with a link pointing an older Tom's Hardware article linking that GitHub patch.

It turned out a couple of years ago that Nvidia's restrictions could be removed by a relatively simple hack.

On another note, the link to Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix doesn't work on my end, it says "Bad Merchant" even on a browser with no addons and customisations activated. And I'm just nitpicking it, but technically this update was also carried out for at least a few 1st Gen Maxwell cards (actually I think it's all of the first generation Maxwell that had the NvEnc module in the first place), not just the 2nd Gen Maxwell as mentioned in the article.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

On another note, the link to Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix doesn't work on my end, it says "Bad Merchant" even on a browser with no addons and customisations activated. And I'm just nitpicking it, but technically this update was also carried out for at least a few 1st Gen Maxwell cards (actually I think it's all of the first generation Maxwell that had the NvEnc module in the first place), not just the 2nd Gen Maxwell as mentioned in the article.

Yeah, our ecommerce stuff is getting involved and screwing it up. Let me fix...

 

[truerock]

Yes, Intel used to spend an enormous amount of time and money making their CPUs run slower. They even drilled holes in some of their CPUs to keep them from being overclocked.

The problem is, once your corporates culture is geared to using its resources trying to figure out how to make your products worse, it is never ever able to recover. It's better just to shut the company down.

 

[Tex61]

"...Nvidia's data center grade and professional GPUs will continue to have an edge over consumer products as now Nvidia does not restrict the number of concurrent sessions on them."

Several of the lower-end Quadro cards are still restricted to three concurrent encodes according to Nvidia's encode matrix. Some do not support any encoding per the matrix.

 

[trebory6]

Unless the page was quietly updated later this was mentioned in the article, with a link pointing an older Tom's Hardware article linking that GitHub patch.




On another note, the link to Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix doesn't work on my end, it says "Bad Merchant" even on a browser with no addons and customisations activated. And I'm just nitpicking it, but technically this update was also carried out for at least a few 1st Gen Maxwell cards (actually I think it's all of the first generation Maxwell that had the NvEnc module in the first place), not just the 2nd Gen Maxwell as mentioned in the article.

I'm pretty sure it was added after the fact. I was specifically looking for mention of the patch in the article when I took the time to post my comment.

I honestly was thinking this might have been a sponsored post advertising this which is why I felt like interjecting a possible solution.