OBS 25.x.x support for NVENC with "stripped" Nvidia drivers possible?

T

TackMeister

Member
Hi,

Been a long time since I have done much of anything with OBS, 2015 basically. Long story but will try to make really short.

We generally don't like to update video drivers for our Nvidia cards with a really, really strong reason to do so. I doubt I need to explain why.... but I can sum it up in 2 words: stability and bugs. 391.35 is what I'm still running. GTX 1080's.

I also generally don't like to install all the garbonzo that comes in Nvidia drivers, it's ridiculous. I found a guide out there that talks about how to strip out all the extra junk, basically all but a few dirs in the unpacked installer can be deleted (at least with 3xx.xx series).

My Windows PC is not for gaming anymore, now I'm doing more music type stuff with it.

But now I have occasion/use for OBS again for something else, and alas, it looks like I will need to either update my Nvidia driver to 418.xx or newer, or find Windows x64 binaries for an older release of OBS Studio (24.0.2 or older, apparently) that will hopefully work with my stripped 391.35 Nvidia drivers I'm running now.

The 4xx.xx series of Nvidia drivers seems mainly about supporting newer GPU's and newer "clicky clicky" game profiles which I have no need for either. But I might have to update anyway.

So - my question is -- does anybody know if:

1. people in modern day (4xx.xx series of drivers for windows) are still "stripping" Nvidia drivers to just basic stuff and (more importantly)
2. if doing so, I could still reasonably expect NVENC encoding to work in current OBS studio versions?

Ideally if somebody who is actually doing #1 and #2 successfully, I'd love to know the details!

Thanks,
TackMeister
 
T

TackMeister

Member
I found that with the stripped-down v391.35 of the driver on my system, the NVENC-related DLL's are where they should be (system32 and sysWOW64 dirs).

Also I found nvslimmer, a current (6/27/2020) util to provide a UI to stripping down bloatware, telemetry, etc. from the Nvidia driver that lets you choose what to remove and leave you with an installer set of files that removes the other shtuff.

www.majorgeeks.com

Download NVSlimmer - MajorGeeks

NVSlimmer is a freeware tool to remove and customize included programs and settings bundled with your NVIDIA driver package. You can then repackage your drivers or apply and install.
www.majorgeeks.com

So I guess I'll take a system backup and try out a newer driver.

Cheers,
TackMeister
 
T

TackMeister

Member
Got it straightened out. I also found another stripper utility made by TechPowerUp called NVCleanStall. So I made a system backup, used DDU to remove the 391.35 driver, and then used NVCleanStall to strip el garbagio out of the 441.87 driver and installed that.

OBS 25.0.8 is happy now.
 
koala

koala

Active Member
You don't really need these stripped down installation packages. If you install the official Nvidia driver package, choose custom installation, and choose to just install the driver and nothing else. Then nothing else except the core driver will be installed. Especially the Geforce experience setting is what will add one gigabyte of bloatware. If you leave that out, all this will not be installed.

I verified this by using nvslimmer to unpack the original package. All components will show up in separate directories. Then I checked which files from which package directory was actually installed in the windows or program files directory by my minimal driver install. It was the core driver package only.
 
T

TackMeister

Member
Already sorted out. I chose to strip down my installation packages.

All the garbage isn't in GFE.

I didn't come here looking to argue. I've already spent the time researching with tools like autoruns what extra crap Nvidia driver packages put on my system even when I (just) manually deleted subdirectories in the unpacked driver. There's a lot of info about it out there. So I appreciate the fact that people are making tools nowadays to give you checkboxes of what to toss or keep, and do a lot of the work for you.

Have a nice day.
 
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koala

koala

Active Member
I don't want to argue. I just want to point to an official, supported, non-hack installation variant with (almost) the same result.

A major problem and time consumer is usually, if you have some kind of issue later. You never know if it is due to using a non-supported driver subset, i. e. by using an incomplete driver, or due to something else. Personally, I tend to use supported things only, and phase out non-supported things. This was different when I was younger, but I realized I'm wasting time by patching and fiddling with things in an unsupported way. Precious time.
 
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