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NVENC/NVDEC and similar technologies use what is effectively an ASIC that happens to be integrated on the GPU. It doesn't use the general purpose GPU cores. Thi
by renhanxue 2y ago
NVENC/NVDEC and similar technologies use what is effectively an ASIC that happens to be integrated on the GPU. It doesn't use the general purpose GPU cores. This is the reason why the limitations on e.g. which codecs it supports are so strictly tied to the hardware generation; it's just fixed function hardware.
There's no reason you can't bundle the same kind of ASIC on a CPU too, and indeed Intel does do that with QuickSync. For video game capture/screen recording though (which is a big part of what people tend to do with NVEnc) it might be a bit more convenient for the chip to be on the GPU? I don't know, not a GPU expert.
- jsheard 2y ago> For video game capture/screen recording though (which is a big part of what people tend to do with NVEnc) it might be a bit more convenient for the chip to be on the GPU? Yeah there's usually a fast path which copies the framebuffer directly to the encoder internally, so the huge uncompressed frames never have to be transferred over the PCI Express bus.
- renhanxue 2y agoThat's exactly what I was thinking of, but I didn't know for sure. Thanks for confirming.