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There is a NVIDIA VIDEO CODEC SDK APPLICATION NOTE - ENCODER in which we can read the following:

While Kepler and first generation Maxwell GPUs had one NVENC engine, certain variants of the second generation Maxwell GPUs and Pascal Generation GPUs have two/three NVENC engines physically present on the silicon.

So, does anyone know how to determine the number of NVENC engines in a GPU or already know the numbers? Because there is no information in NVIDIA datasheets and they are annoyingly silent in their own developer forums.

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  • Agreed with you on "They are annoyingly silent in their own developer forums"!
    – RawBean
    Nov 4, 2016 at 6:59
  • Why do you want to know the number of NVENC engines? is it for estimating the impact on the performances ?
    – RawBean
    Nov 4, 2016 at 7:03
  • Sure. And this is also a budget question. For example, let's assume that all GeForce cards have only one engine. It means there is no sense in buying high-end card as the low-end cards contain the same chip (not sure about impact of memory performance, which are different, but I think the bottleneck is going to be in disk to memory operations not in memory to encoder).
    – Sergey
    Nov 4, 2016 at 8:01
  • In fact I has the same question than you. I bought one GTX 1060 and one GTX 1080. I benchmakred the two. It was part of my paid work so I can't share all the results publicly.
    – RawBean
    Nov 4, 2016 at 8:10

2 Answers 2

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Since you are actually more interested in performance (Frame Per Second) than in the NVENC engines count, please consider my below rounded up figures. I've compared GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 only.

  • H264, GTX 1080 encodes 70% faster than GTX 1060
  • HEVC, GTX 1080 encodes 140% faster than GTX 1060
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  • 1/2. Thanks for sharing publicly. By performance I didn't mean FPS of encoding of just one video but, for example, number of encoded video clips per day. To maximize the value I need to run several encoding tasks in parallel. In case of 2 engines the second parallel clip should be available like 'for free' in comparison with a card with only one engine. In my current GTX 650 setup a clip gets encoded with 68 FPS, two parallel clips with ~34 FPS which proves that the engine is in fact the only one.
    – Sergey
    Nov 4, 2016 at 18:28
  • 2/2. Unfortunately I don't know if the driver can split one encoding task between several engines so we can't figure out number of engines from the numbers you provided. The source of 70/140% improvement can be in simply faster memory configuration.
    – Sergey
    Nov 4, 2016 at 18:30
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NVIDIA have just published Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix that contains number of NVENC chips for Pro-level cards.

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