4 ms·

Nvidia-patch: removes restriction simultaneous video encoding sessions

86 points by jordigh 2y ago

burningion 2y ago
I see the limitation used to be 3, but was raised over a year to 8 for most modern GPUs: https://videocardz.com/newz/nvdia-geforce-gpus-now-support-up-to-8-concurrent-nvenc-encoding-sessions https://videocardz.com/newz/nvdia-geforce-gpus-now-support-u... Anyone know what sort of a difference "unlimited" NVENC streams means in practice for a 4090?
- burningion 2y ago
  Found this reference to show the potential capabilities of each card: https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding Seems a 4090 is capable of 22 concurrent h264 / av1 / hevc streams, quite a bit less than the default unlocked 8.
  - hcfman 2y ago
    Is decoding limited then? That link above talks about only 1x nvdec task. What does this mean in practice? Clearly it doesn't mean just decoding a single h264 stream??
    - burningion 2y ago
      So I think if I'm reading it right, it means there's 1x NVDEC chips. Each chip is capable of handling multiple encodings / decodings, as each of the transcodings list means concurrent streams of NVDEC -> NVENC.
HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
What is the purpose of restricting it in the first place? Are there enough people out there streaming dozens of videos for Nvidia to care to milk them?
- pjc50 2y ago
  Upselling the few commercial users.
- heroprotagonist 2y ago
  They want to push people who would use more than that to a more commercial grade GPU, which costs thousands more for the hardware and have a $450 driver. There's a big jump in price at the very low end of their enterprise line for a not-very-large difference in performance from their high end gaming/consumer GPU. So they do stuff like this, and explicitly blacklisting vGPU support (even if you pay the $450 price tag for their enterprise driver, you also need the hardware). As soon as you start to scale GPU-intensive activities, you either have to overpay cloud services or tack on overhead for enterprise capability as an Nvidia tax.
MuffinFlavored 2y ago
Pretty clean shell script: https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch/blob/master/patch.sh https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch/blob/master/patch.sh Surprised there are no protection/obfuscation methods against patching the `.so` in this fashion. No checksums, signatures, etc.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  Give it time, the Bogeyman for this will be attestation and verified boot/data integrity+safety Took them a while to sort out BIOS mods/signing firmware. The irons are in the other fires. Not an endorsement, I got into computing because of the openness. I'm with Torvalds RE: nvidia
- izacus 2y ago
  That's because the target market isn't going to risk running this kind of patch. From my experience working on enterprise software, you just need something basic to curb the "oh, intern installed it and then we copied it to production" type behaviour. As soon as you have something that gets flagged to legal/managers you're good. Not worth going beyond that.
andrewstuart 2y ago
There’s no artificial limit on AMD and Intel I think. Proves that competition fixes these greedy nvidia artificially restricted capabilities. If it’s up to 8 then you gotta wonder why bother have any limit at all.
WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
In a normal society, nvidia would be sued But we live in clowntopia, so we deserve this

86 points by jordigh 2y ago

I see the limitation used to be 3, but was raised over a year to 8 for most modern GPUs: https://videocardz.com/newz/nvdia-geforce-gpus-now-support-up-to-8-concurrent-nvenc-encoding-sessions https://videocardz.com/newz/nvdia-geforce-gpus-now-support-u... Anyone know what sort of a difference "unlimited" NVENC streams means in practice for a 4090?

burningion 2y ago
Found this reference to show the potential capabilities of each card: https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding Seems a 4090 is capable of 22 concurrent h264 / av1 / hevc streams, quite a bit less than the default unlocked 8.
- hcfman 2y ago
  Is decoding limited then? That link above talks about only 1x nvdec task. What does this mean in practice? Clearly it doesn't mean just decoding a single h264 stream??
  - burningion 2y ago
    So I think if I'm reading it right, it means there's 1x NVDEC chips. Each chip is capable of handling multiple encodings / decodings, as each of the transcodings list means concurrent streams of NVDEC -> NVENC.

HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago

What is the purpose of restricting it in the first place? Are there enough people out there streaming dozens of videos for Nvidia to care to milk them?

pjc50 2y ago
Upselling the few commercial users.
heroprotagonist 2y ago
They want to push people who would use more than that to a more commercial grade GPU, which costs thousands more for the hardware and have a $450 driver. There's a big jump in price at the very low end of their enterprise line for a not-very-large difference in performance from their high end gaming/consumer GPU. So they do stuff like this, and explicitly blacklisting vGPU support (even if you pay the $450 price tag for their enterprise driver, you also need the hardware). As soon as you start to scale GPU-intensive activities, you either have to overpay cloud services or tack on overhead for enterprise capability as an Nvidia tax.

MuffinFlavored 2y ago

Pretty clean shell script: https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch/blob/master/patch.sh https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch/blob/master/patch.sh Surprised there are no protection/obfuscation methods against patching the `.so` in this fashion. No checksums, signatures, etc.

bravetraveler 2y ago
Give it time, the Bogeyman for this will be attestation and verified boot/data integrity+safety Took them a while to sort out BIOS mods/signing firmware. The irons are in the other fires. Not an endorsement, I got into computing because of the openness. I'm with Torvalds RE: nvidia
izacus 2y ago
That's because the target market isn't going to risk running this kind of patch. From my experience working on enterprise software, you just need something basic to curb the "oh, intern installed it and then we copied it to production" type behaviour. As soon as you have something that gets flagged to legal/managers you're good. Not worth going beyond that.

andrewstuart 2y ago

There’s no artificial limit on AMD and Intel I think. Proves that competition fixes these greedy nvidia artificially restricted capabilities. If it’s up to 8 then you gotta wonder why bother have any limit at all.

WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago

In a normal society, nvidia would be sued But we live in clowntopia, so we deserve this