Question / Help Recording more than 2 h.264 streams with NVENC

R

Rinsky

New Member
Has anyone tried to record more than 2 h.264 streams with NVENC?

It's propably not going to work with a Geforce card, because I read that "The NVENC policy for Geforce is to support up to 2 H.264 streams".

Has anyone had the chance to test NVENC with a Quadro card or something? Is it possible to record more than 2 streams with one of those cards?
 
Jack0r

Jack0r

The Helping Squad
Well, I dont think most people will use more than one stream ;D But how is the NVENC policy for quaddro cards? I would assume there is a reason for this limit.
 
R

Rinsky

New Member
Boildown

Boildown

Active Member
If you have a half-way decent CPU, you can try additional OBS instances on x264 using something like SuperFast preset. This is assuming NVEnc really doesn't allow more than 2 instances itself.
 
R

Rinsky

New Member
Thanks for the advice, but I've already tried that und it needs too much CPU power, because I want to send a halfway decent rtmp stream with x.264 (Program Out) and record the 6 incoming video signals at the same time on the same machine.

I tried it with my 3770k and it works with 5 recordings at the same time (two of them are with NVENC), but with the 6th recording the cpu workload reaches 100% and I get frame drops.

Besides that I probably wanna use the same Computer for other stuff as well, so I don't even wanna get near 80%.

I thought that NVENC would be the perfect solution, because the quality is not that bad (better than superfast x.264) and I don't have any CPU problems. I also have a better CPU (4930k) in another PC, but I don't think that it will solve my problem.

I would like to know if anyone here has tried NVENC with a Quadro card because it looks like that there is a way to encode more than 2 signals: http://www.ozone3d.net/public/jegx/201212/nvenc_hardware_capabilities_kepler_gpu.jpg

I would buy myself a Quadro K4000 and would use it only for the Encoding, the Geforce would do the rest, if thats possible.
 
Boildown

Boildown

Active Member
Have you tried Quicksync for some of the streams? I'm not sure that anyone has tested Quicksync for more than one stream, but that one will reduce some of the CPU utilization itself.

Another thing to try is more than one NVEnc-capable card in the computer. I have in the past tested a GT630 (borrowed from my HTPC) for NVEnc in addition to a GTX560Ti, which isn't NVEnc capable. In theory you could put in as many video cards as you have 4x, 8x, or 16x PCIe slots, and run 2 NVEnc instances off of each. I've not tested doing that though. This is probably far cheaper than a Quadro card, and you can probably beg, borrow, or temporarily steal enough NVEnc - capable video cards to test it out before buying. A GTX 750 goes for ~US$100 and is great for NVEnc encoding.

I myself have no idea of the capabilities of a Quadro card for NVEnc encoding. Maybe someone else does and will speak up, but that seems like one of those things that probably no one has tried.
 
R

Rinsky

New Member
I finally tried it with 2 GPUs in one machine. Unfortunately Nvidia stilll forbids to record more than 2 streams with nvenc, it looks like that it's not "2 streams per Geforce", it's rather "2 streams per machine if you use a Geforce GPU".

So, it looks like a Quadro card is my only chance to record upt to 6 streams with NVEnc.

I already asked the Nvidia support and they told me that it is posslbie with a Quadro K4000, but they also told me that it's not possible to run a Geforce and a Quadro card in the same machine. Has anyone here ever tried to do that?

Oh.. and I don't have a mainboard that supports Quicksync
 
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