NVENC Preset Migration Guide

This document provides table to map the NVENCODE API settings (specifically, preset and rate control mode) from Video Codec SDK 9.1 and earlier to the closest equivalent NVENCODE API settings in Video Codec SDK 10.0 and later. This table can be used as a migration guide to migrate to the new NVENCODE API preset architecture introduced in Video Codec SDK 10.0.

In general, it is strongly recommended to use the newer presets and NVENCODE API settings based on desired performance/quality trade-off. It is highly likely that your application may benefit from better quality encoding or higher performance by directly using the new NVENCODE presets, as the new APIs provide much more flexibility than earlier and are easy to understand.

Please use the mapping tables in this document only in situations where exactly same performance/quality is desired as was obtained in the older presets.

Table 1 and Table 2 show the mapping between older and newer presets exposed in the NVENCODE API for HEVC and H.264, respectively. Note that there is no support for older presets in AV1

A combination of older preset (Column 1), rate control (RC) mode (Column 2) and resolution (Column 3) can be mapped to a new parameters of NVENCODE API: tuning info (Column 4), RC Mode (Column 5), preset (Column 7&9) and multipass (Column 6&8). The newer preset and multipass values will vary based on GPU Architecture and appropriate GPU architecture column must be selected.

In some cases, additional settings need to be included for exact mapping, and they are mentioned in columns Features 1 (Column 10 in Table 1 and Column 12 in Table 2) and Features 2 (Column 11 in Table 1 and Column 13 in Table 2).

As an example, if someone is using HEVC HQ Preset with VBR_HQ RC Mode for a 1080p encoding on Turing platform, this corresponds to Row 18 in Table 1. The closest settings as per the new NVENCODE API is P6 Preset, RC Mode VBR, Multipass set to 1, FrameIntervalP set to 1, IDR Period set to 60 and GOP Length set to 60.

It is important to note that Features 1 and Features 2 are just indicated to get an exact feature match on older presets and most applications would set these based on needs. For example, GOP length may be set to a larger value depending upon the application needs.

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