NVEnc

by rigaya

This software is meant to investigate performance and image quality of HW encoder (NVENC) of NVIDIA. There are 2 types of software developed, one is command line version that runs independently, and the nother is a output plug-in of Aviutl.

NVEncC.exe ... Command line version supporting transcoding.
NVEnc.auo ... Output plugin for Aviutl.

Downloads & update history

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github releases

Install

Install instructions for Windows and Linux

Build

Build instructions for Windows and Linux

System Requirements

Windows 10/11 (x86 / x64)
Linux (x64)
Aviutl 1.00 or later (NVEnc.auo)
Hardware which supports NVENC
NVIDIA GPU GeForce Kepler gen or later (GT / GTX 6xx or later)
※ Since GT 63x, 62x etc. are renames of the Fermi generation, they cannot run NVEnc.

NVEnc	Supported NVENC API	Required graphics driver version
NVEnc 0.00 or later	4.0	NVIDIA graphics driver 334.89 or later
NVEnc 1.00 or later	5.0	NVIDIA graphics driver 347.09 or later
NVEnc 2.00 or later	6.0	NVIDIA graphics driver 358 or later
NVEnc 2.08 or later	7.0	NVIDIA graphics driver 368.69 or later
NVEnc 3.02 or later	7.0	NVIDIA graphics driver 369.30 or later
NVEnc 3.08 or later	8.0	NVIDIA graphics driver 378.66 or later
NVEnc 4.00 or later	8.1	NVIDIA graphics driver 390.77 or later
NVEnc 4.31 or later	9.0	NVIDIA graphics driver 418.81 or later
NVEnc 4.51 or later	9.1	NVIDIA graphics driver 436.15 or later
NVEnc 5.10 or later	9.0, 9.1, 10.0	NVIDIA graphics driver 418.81 or later
NVEnc 5.18 or later	9.0, 9.1, 10.0, 11.0	NVIDIA graphics driver 418.81 or later
NVEnc 5.24 or later	9.0, 9.1, 10.0, 11.0	NVIDIA graphics driver 418.81 or later (x64) NVIDIA graphics driver 456.81 or later (x86)
NVEnc 5.36 or later	9.0, 9.1, 10.0, 11.0, 11.1	NVIDIA graphics driver 418.81 or later (x64) NVIDIA graphics driver 456.81 or later (x86)

Supported NVENC API	Required graphics driver version
9.0	NVIDIA graphics driver (Win 418.81 / Linux 418.30) or later
9.1	NVIDIA graphics driver (Win 436.15 / Linux 435.21) or later
10.0	NVIDIA graphics driver (Win 445.87 / Linux 450.51) or later
11.0	NVIDIA graphics driver (Win 456.71 / Linux 455.28) or later
11.1	NVIDIA graphics driver (Win 471.41 / Linux 470.57.02) or later

CUDA version	Required graphics driver version
10.1	NVIDIA graphics driver (Win 418.96 / Linux 418.39) or later
10.2.89	NVIDIA graphics driver (Win 440.33 / Linux 441.22) or later
11.0.2	NVIDIA graphics driver (Win 451.48 / Linux 450.51.05) or later
11.0.3	NVIDIA graphics driver (Win 451.82 / Linux 450.51.06) or later
11.1.0	NVIDIA graphics driver (Win 456.38 / Linux 455.23) or later
11.1.1	NVIDIA graphics driver (Win 456.81 / Linux 455.32) or later
11.2	NVIDIA graphics driver (Win 460.89 / Linux 460.27.04) or later

Usage and options of NVEncC

Option list and details of NVEncC

Examples of supported encode features

Result of --check-features, a feature list returned from the driver. May depend on the driver version.

GPU Gen	Windows	Linux
Kepler	GTX660Ti	Tesla K80
Maxwell	GTX970	Tesla M80
Pascal	GTX1080, GTX1070, GTX1060, GTX1050Ti	GTX1080
Volta	GTX1650
Turing	RTX2070, RTX2060, GTX1660Ti, GTX1650 Super	Tesla T4
Ampere	RTX3090, RTX3080, RTX3050Ti

Precautions for using NVEnc

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.

The output from NVEnc may not include the max_dec_frame_buffering field, which might cause problem in some playback environments.

Main usable functions

Common to NVEnc / NVEncC

Encoding using NVENC
- H.264 / AVC
  - YUV420 / YUV444
- H.265 / HEVC (2nd Gen Maxwell or later)
  - YUV420 / YUV444
  - 10 bits
Each encode mode of NVENC
- CQP (fixed quantization)
- CBR (Constant bitrate)
- CBRHQ (Constant bitrate, high quality)
- VBR (Variable bitrate)
- VBRHQ (Variable bitrate, high quality)
Interlaced encoding (by PAFF)
Lossless output (YUV 420 / YUV 444)
supports setting of codec profile & level, SAR, colormatrix, maxbitrate, GOP len, etc...

NVEncC

Supports cuvid decoding
- MPEG1
- MPEG2
- H.264 / AVC
- HEVC (10 bit / 12bitdepth with YUV444 support)
- VC-1
- VP9
Supports various formats such as avs, vpy, y4m, and raw
Supports demux/muxing using libavformat
Supports decode using libavcodec
Calculation of ssim/psnr/vmaf of the encode
High performance filtering (VPP, Video Pre-Processing)
- cuvid built-in hw processing
  - resize
  - deinterlace (normal / bob)
- GPU filtering by CUDA
  - rff (apply rff flag)
  - deinterlacer
    - afs (Automatic field shift)
    - nnedi
    - yadif
  - decimate
  - mpdecimate
  - colorspace conversion (x64 version only)
    - hdr2sdr
    - lut3d
  - delogo
  - subburn
  - resize
    - bilinear
    - spline16, spline36, spline64
    - lanczos2, lanczos3, lanczos4
    - various algorithms by npp library are available (x64 version only)
  - transpose / rotate / flip
  - padding
  - select-every
  - deband
  - noise reduction
    - knn (K-nearest neighbor)
    - pmd (modified pmd method)
    - gauss (npp library, x64 version only)
    - convolution3d
  - edge / detail enhancement
    - unsharp
    - edgelevel (edge level adjustment)
    - warpsharp

NVEnc.auo (Aviutl plugin)

Audio encoding
Mux audio and chapter
afs (Automatic field shift) support

Auto GPU selection in multi GPU envinronment

NVEncC will automatically select a GPU depending on the options used, when there are multiple GPUs available which support NVENC. --device option can be used to specify on which GPU to run manually.

Select GPU which supports...
Items below will be checked whether the GPU supports it or not

Codec, Profile, Level
Additionally, below items will be checked if specified
- 10bit depth encoding
- Lossless encoding
- Interlaced encoding
- HW decode support for ssim/psnr/vmaf calculation

Prefer GPU which supports...

B frame support

If there are multiple GPUs which suports all the items checked in 1. and 2., GPU below will be prefered.

GPU which has low Video Engine(VE) utilization
GPU which has low GPU core utilization
newer Generation GPU
GPU with more CUDA cores

The purpose of selecting GPU with lower VE/GPU ulitization is to assign tasks to mulitple GPUs and improve the throughput of the tasks. Also, newer Gen GPU and GPU with more cores are assumed to have improved performance.

Please note that VE and GPU ulitization are check at the initialization pahse of the app, and there are delays in values taken. Therefore, it is likely that the multiple tasks started at the same time to run on the same GPU, and divided into multiple GPUs, even if the options are supported in every GPUs.

NVEnc source code

MIT license.
This program is based on NVIDA CUDA Samples and includes sample code. This software contains source code provided by NVIDIA Corporation.
This software depends on jitify, ffmpeg, vmaf, tinyxml2, dtl, libass, ttmath & Caption2Ass. For these licenses, please see the header part of the corresponding source and NVEnc_license.txt.

About source code

Windows ... VC build

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zmf2022/NVEnc