Sunday, June 14th 2020
NVIDIA Silently Increases GeForce NVENC Concurrent Sessions Limit to 3
NVIDIA has reportedly increased the concurrent sessions limit of its NVENC hardware video encoder on GeForce graphics cards to 3, up from 2. This means up to three different apps could use NVENC simultaneously, or an app (such as Premiere Pro) could use up to three sessions of NVENC for faster live previews during video editing. NVIDIA's Quadro family graphics cards can have practically unlimited NVENC concurrent sessions. The company recently updated the NVENC support matrix page showing a "Max # of concurrent sessions" increase from 2 to 3. The first screenshot below shows the updated page, and the second one shows a Web Archive snapshot from 2 weeks ago. NVIDIA last updated its GeForce drivers late May with 446.14 WHQL, so you might want to update your drivers.
Source:
gapbl4 (Reddit)
10 Comments on NVIDIA Silently Increases GeForce NVENC Concurrent Sessions Limit to 3
Or are they getting a little twitchy with RDNA2 on it's way ?.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC
Like is it not better to encode something using the full available ermm power? instead of spreading it out?
orr is there some cap anyway, that it already sis working as hard as it can on that one task due to how the software works, sooo might as well have multiple instances?
like when using it for livestreaming, the more it can encode, the less bandwith would be needed so I would think having the card dedicated to doing all it can for that 1 task is better then making it do multiple tasks lazily
That being said, users have been able to unlock the NVENC limit for a long time now, and have 8 simultaneous streams on servers providing Plex streams.
One of their multimedia engineer team members was somewhat active in github issue comments in the past, the gist I got is that AMD simply won't allow a larger transistor budget on their GPUs for media encoding, so they have to make do. They view media encoding more like a checkbox affair, instead of any focus on actually improving output quality.
I was looking to buy a Quadro Pro P400 for Plex transcoding on a server because it was relatively cost effective at about ~$70 USD, doesn't require power beyond what is provided via the PCIe slot and is single slot / single height. Unfortunately now its typical for a new Quadro Pro P400 to cost north of ~$115 USD.