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Quest Techie: Fixing NVENC Issues Causing Link To Fail
You’re were all excited about Oculus Link — but when it released to beta in November 2019, it wouldn’t work for you. Or maybe you’re trying to use OBS to stream some Link action to your YouTube or Twitch channel — and get a cryptic error message. NVIDIA’s NVENC limitations may be the issue and I’ll help you fix them.
Nvidia NVENC (NVIDIA Encoder) is a feature in its graphics cards that performs video encoding, offloading this compute-intensive task from the CPU.
Welcome To The World Of Compression
Video compression is a very resource-hungry process and is used for a variety of use cases. Maybe you’re ripping a Blu ray movie to MP4 format. Maybe you’re live streaming gameplay from your PC to Twitch or YouTube.
Or maybe you’re trying to use Oculus Link with an NVIDIA graphics card. Maybe you wondered why not every card can support Link?
Thanks to the advanced GPUs we have today, we can hand off “mundane” tasks like video encoding to dedicated hardware on our video cards (Intel and AMD have similar “hardware encoders” built into some of their cards too) — leaving the rest of the GPU and CPU to run our favorite games or do other work.
