NVIDIA appears to have removed a limitation imposed on its consumer graphics cards that previously reduced their video encoding capability. As discovered this Friday (24) by the staff of the Tom’s Hardwarethe hardware giant has made a discreet change to the support page for the GeForce line.
Previously, consumer portfolio products were limited to encoding up to three video streams simultaneously. Now the video cards will be able to encode up to five streams at the same timeallowing content creators and other professionals in the field to get more performance when compressing new production.
Although the manufacturer has not yet explicitly commented on the change, it is believed that it will be made available through a driver update for several video cards released since 2014, including models from the lines:
- 1st and 2nd generation Maxwell
- Pascal
- Turing
- Ampere
- There’s Lovelace
It should be noted that not all models released under the mentioned generations are compatible with simultaneous encoding of streams. Essentially, the technology is not supported by “MX” series graphics accelerators.
The video cards listed on NVIDIA’s official page have enough power to encode multiple streams in parallel, but the company imposes such limitations to encourage consumers to purchase workstation hardware models, such as the RTX 6000, which have much more features to productivity than the gamer line.
For maximum performance, it is always important to keep the manufacturer’s graphics driver up to date. NVIDIA recently released an update that can even improve the playback quality of videos on YouTube.