NVIDIA has quietly removed some video encoding limitations on its consumer GeForce graphics processing units (GPUs), allowing encoding of up to five simultaneous streams. Previously, NVIDIA's consumer GeForce GPUs were limited to three simultaneous NVENC encodes. The same limitation did not apply to professional GPUs.

According to NVIDIA's own Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix document, the number of concurrent NVENC encodes on consumer GPUs have been increased from three to five. This includes certain GeForce GPUs based on Maxwell 2nd Gen, Pascal, Turing, Ampere, and Ada Lovelace GPU architectures. While the number of concurrent NVDEC decodes were never limited, there is a limitation on how many streams you can encode by certain GPU, depending on the resolution of the stream and the codec.Of course, this does not mean that NVIDIA consumer GeForce GPUs will magically get more NVENC (NVIDIA Encoder) and NVDEC (NVIDIA Decoder) hardware units, as, for example, the AD102 GPU has a total of three NVENC and three NVDEC units. NVIDIA enables all three on the RTX 6000 Ada Generation workstation graphics cards, while only two were enabled on GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards.

As noted by Tomshardware, NVIDIA's stance on NVENC and NVDEC limitations has obviously changed now, lifting some of those encoding sessions limitations on consumer GPUs, while workstation-grade and data center-grade GPUs are still only limited by the actual hardware capabilities, codec, and video quality.