Skip to content

Installing Nvidia drivers

Minimal version of Nvidia drivers

The minimal supported version of Nvidia drivers is:

  • Linux: 520.56.06 or newer
  • Windows: 522.25 or newer

Nvidia encoding requires a hardware GPU from Nvidia!

This hardware was not designed and manufactured by Quickstream and is not provided with software!

Limitations of Nvidia cards

Nvidia cards have coupe limitations that depend on their generation and version.

  1. Interlace is supported only by Kepler, Maxwell, and Pascal generations.
  2. H.265 (HEVC) does not support interlace at all. It is a codec limitation.
  3. H.265 (HEVC) B-frames are supported by the Turing and newer generations.
  4. Low-end cards and consumer cards have a limited number of encoding sessions that depend on the driver version.

Sources:

Nvidia official video encode support matrix

Wikipedia article about Nvidia encoding

Which card should I buy?

It depends on your usage. But look only at Quadra and datacenter ones. Here are some recomendations from Quickstream team that comes from our experiance not only from using Quickstream but other encoders that uses Nvidia encoding.

Are you planing to use interlace H.264 encoding?

If yes. Buy used Quadra P4000 or P2000. Note that P4000 requires an additional 6-pin power connector so not all servers will support it. It is the last GPU that supports interlace in H.264 (AVC) encoding. It is not powerful newer cards do not support interlace encoding at all.

Other cases

Buy the newest or almost the newest Quadra 2000 or 4000. Remember that you can have multiple GPUs in one system for encoding. We can recomend Quadro A4000.

Driver installation

Installation depends on operating system.

Ubuntu

Danger

Install drivers from official Canonical repository! Installing drivers from Nvidia website could corrupt our system.

Please refer to official Ubuntu documentation for complete documentation.

Windows

Download drivers form Nvidia website and then install it from downloaded installer.