Re:I designed my own fast game streaming video codec
by miladyincontrol on Tuesday July 29, 2025 @12:55AM
(#44719207)
Im pretty sure they arent dedicated ASIC engines anymore. Thats why hacks like nvidia-patch are a thing where you can scale up NVENC usage up to the full GPU's compute rather than the arbitrary limitation nvidia adds. The penalty for using them within those limitations tends to be negligible however.
And on a similar note, NvFBC helps a ton with latency but its disabled on a driver level for consumer cards.
Re:I designed my own fast game streaming video codec
by theshackleford on Tuesday July 29, 2025 @02:39AM
(#44719844)
> Im pretty sure they arent dedicated ASIC engines anymore.
They are. That patch doesnt do what you think it does.
Generally, you're right that these hardware blocks favor latency. One example of this is motion estimation (one of the most expensive operations during encoding). The NVENC engine on NVidia GPUs will only use fairly basic detection loops, but can optionally be fed motion hints from an external source. I know that NVidia has a CUDA-based motion estimator (called CEA) for this purpose. On recent GPUs there is also the optical flow engine (another separate block) which might be able to do higher quality detection.