NVENC Hardware Capabilities Feature Supported codec H.264 What it Provides H.264 base, main, high profiles Wide range of use-cases Up to 8x HD encode 240 fps) Flexible ME, QP maps YUV 4:2:0 and planar 4:4:4 support MVC Up to in hardware API Faster than real-time encoding Customizable quality, (ROI) region of interest encoding High-quality encoding with and without chroma subsampling Full-resolution stereo encode High resolution encode NVENC SDK (Flexible API available on Windows and Linux) The first Generation Maxwell GPUs support all Kepler NVENC features along with the following additional features below. NVENC CAPABILITIES At a high level, capabilities of NVENC hardware are summarized in Table 1. NVENC - NVIDIA Hardware Video Encoder NVENC_DA _v04 5Ħ 2. Although there is some overlap in the functionality provided by these two SDK s, they are designed for slightly different use-cases (explained further in Section 3). As explained in Section 3, NVENC hardware s encoding capabilities can be accessed via NVENC API and GRID API. The later versions of NVENC present the Maxwell class of GPUs further improve the encoding performance and also provide several additional features. The hardware is optimized to provide excellent quality at high performance, enabling a wide range of applications that require video encoding capabilities. It also leaves the CPU and GPU graphics engine to perform other tasks. NVENC, being dedicated H.264 hardware on the GPU chip, does not use the GPU s graphics engine and hence uses much less power compared to the CUDA-based encoder. This approach also increased overall system power consumption. One of the disadvantages of the CUDA-based encoder is that it uses a combination of the CPU and GPU s graphics engine for encoding, taking away processing power from other tasks that can be performed on the CPU and GPU s graphics engine. Before Kepler GPUs, the only GPU based solution for video encoding was to do encoding using CUDA. This document provides information about the capabilities of the hardware encoder, along with some relevant data about encoding quality and performance. INTRODUCTION NVIDIA s latest generation of GPUs based on the Kepler and Maxwell architecture, contain a hardware-based H.264 video encoder (henceforth referred to as NVENC).
Additional Software Features in SDK Table 4 Comparison between NVENC SDK and GRID SDK Capabilities NVENC - NVIDIA Hardware Video Encoder NVENC_DA _v04 ivĥ NVIDIA HARDWARE VIDEO ENCODER (NVENC) 1. Additional NVENC Hardware Capabilities in Maxwell GPUs.
1 NVENC NVIDIA HARDWARE VIDEO ENCODER NVENC_DA _v04 July 2014 Application NoteĢ DOCUMENT CHANGE HISTORY NVENC_DA _v04 Version Date Authors Description of Change 01 January 30,2012 AP/CC Initial release 02 SeptemAP Updated for NVENC SDK release ApAP Updated for Monterey SDK update 04 AugAP Updated for NVENC SDK release JSM/AP Updated for NVENC SDK release 4.0 NVENC - NVIDIA Hardware Video Encoder NVENC_DA _v04 iiģ TABLE OF CONTENTS NVIDIA Hardware Video Encoder (NVENC) Introduction NVENC Capabilities Block Diagram Performance Programming NVENC Performance NUMBERS NVENC - NVIDIA Hardware Video Encoder NVENC_DA _v04 iiiĤ LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.