I am expecting four hardware h264 encode streams. At the present time we have succeeded in creating only two. This has been either one on each GPU, or or two for a single GPU. Ie; can’t create three or four with our application.
NVENC LICENSING POLICY
As far as NVENC hardware encoding is concerned, NVIDIA GPUs are classified into two categories: “qualified” and “non-qualified”. On qualified GPUs, the number of concurrent encode sessions is limited by available system resources (encoder capacity, system memory, video memory etc.). On non-qualified GPUs, the number of concurrent encode sessions is limited to 2 per system. This limit of 2 concurrent sessions per system applies to the combined number of encoding sessions executed on all non-qualified cards present in the system.
For a complete list of qualified and non-qualified GPUs, refer to https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-video-codec-sdk.
For example, on a system with one Quadro K4000 card (which is a qualified GPU) and three GeForce cards (which are non-qualified GPUs), the application can run N simultaneous encode sessions on Quadro K4000 card (where N is defined by the encoder/memory/hardware limitations) and two sessions on all the three GeForce cards combined. Thus, the limit on the number of simultaneous encode sessions for such a system is N + 2.