Question / Help For those who have installed Windows 10 and want to use NVENC, There is a fix.

Jack Gray

New Member
Windows 10 has been available to almost everyone with windows 7 and 8 as a free upgrade. I myself liked the idea of a new operating system with new features such as DirectX 12. I also use OBS to capture gaming footage and commentary for my Youtube channel and NVENC did a great job of alowing me to do this while keeping my game running smoothly. However because I don't really keep up to date with the forums, I made the mistake of upgrading to Windows 10! I know that there are probably other people on the same boat as me which is why I am posting this.

The Problem

It appears that the most recent update to the Nvidia graphics drivers (353.62) did not include CUDA. CUDA is Nvidia's way of using the GPU for general purpose computing which includes Physx and NVENC. So when I attempted to record with my personal settings it showed a message telling me that the encoding initialisation failed. I then opened GPU-Z and found that my GTX 970 was no longer capable of any kind of general purpose computing. But after some searching on the internet, I found a solution (at least a temporary one)

The Fix

The first step
is to download an installer for version 7.0 of the CUDA Toolkit which can be found here:
https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads

Although It does not officially support windows 10, this shouldn't be a problem. The CUDA Toolkit is a program targeted at developers who want to create GPU accelerated applications.

The second step is to run the installer. during the process, It will ask you to install Microsoft Visual Studio as it is needed for the program itself to fully function but for the purposes of enabling CUDA it will not be needed. You can continue to install the Toolkit without it. Not only does it install Toolkit but it also installs the graphics drivers required to run it including CUDA.

Once installed you should be able to use NVENC once again. (note, OBS does sometimes freeze upon start of capture)

To prove this fix does work, Here is a screenshot of my desktop with the GPU-Z program open, confirming that all general computing including CUDA and PhysX is now in fact enabled.

m6vDyJLwJcquFSJG


Although It worked for me, I understand It may not work for everyone else so please feel free to contribute to this thread if you have any problems or questions but to be honest I have no Idea how and why this worked and why it might not :) Please also note that this is only (probably) a temporary fix as new graphics drivers and versions of windows 10 will be developed!
 

Jack Gray

New Member
Update: I worked out what It did. Not only did it install drivers for CUDA but it forced a rollback of the graphics drivers to version 347.62 If you have followed my instructions on this thread, Geforce Experience will try to get you to install version 353.62. If you want to continue to use NVENC do not install the drivers as recording using NVENC with the new drivers will throw a similar error again.
 

Jack Gray

New Member
hmmm... strange how it works for you but not for me. I just hoped by posting this I could help some people with the same problems
 
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