How to Bypass NVIDIA NVENC Limits on RTX Cards on Linux

It appears that NVIDIA has limited the number of NVEncoding streams on consumer GPUs. Guess it is so people have to buy the more expensive professional cards.

Fortunately, the limit is only applied to the driver, and there is a patch available that let’s us bypass the limiter.

https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch

Install Patch

This assumes you already have the driver installed. If you do not, or run into issues with the commands below, refer to the above link.

Download the tool

https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch/archive/refs/heads/master.zip

wget https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch/archive/refs/heads/master.zip

Unzip the file

unzip nvidia-patch-master.zip

Run the patch script

cd nvidia-patch-master
sudo bash ./patch.sh

And we are finished!

Further reading

NVIDIA has a matrix of which cards support how many streams etc.

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new

And while we are on the topic of artificial limits, check out the vGPU license bypass

https://github.com/KrutavShah/vGPU_LicenseBypass