NVENC: Video Codec Changes to Older Preset and RC Mode Support

[hydra3333]

Hello. Looks like older presets are being removed, which could mean changes may be needed to ffmpeg.

Hello, I received an email with this info:

Planned rollout in 2024. What to Know About This Update

The NVIDIA Video Codec SDK is working towards updates regarding preset support. In this update support for older presets will be removed.

Background:

• Video Codec SDK introduced new presets (p1-p7) and RC modes for H264 and HEVC in Video Codec SDK 10.0 in June 2020. This was done to simplify the usage of NVENC presets.
• Older presets and RC modes are currently supported in four SDK versions (10.0, 11.0, 11.1, 12.0).
• The older presets and RC modes support only HEVC and H.264. AV1 or new features such as split encode, encode quality improvements done post v10.0 are not supported.
• In SDK 12.1, the older presets and RC modes were removed from the Video SDK C header.
• Video Codec SDK supports backward compatibility. Applications compiled with SDK versions < 10.0 using older presets and older RC modes are supported in the driver.

Future steps:

• The plan is to remove driver support in R550 (Q1’24). Therefore, all applications compiled with older presets/RC modes will stop working if upgraded to R550 drivers.
• The R545 will be the last driver release which will support the older presets and RC modes. The R545 release notes will have the final warning included.

Migration guide:

• NVIDIA has provided a migration guide (NVENC Preset Migration Guide - NVIDIA Docs) to enable a seamless transition to the new NVENC API preset architecture.
• Please refer to the link below for details regarding HEVC, H.264 migration tables.

Learn More ​https://docs.nvidia.com/video-technologies/video-codec-sdk/12.1/nvenc-preset-migration-guide/index.html
(has a list of preset mappings)