Turing GPUs will come with an improved NVENC video encoder that adds support for H.265 (HEVC) 8K encode at 30 FPS, while also providing up to 25% in bitrate savings for HEVC and 15% in bitrate savings for H.264 relative to the previous encoder.

Lower encode quality compared to pure CPU encoding has been an issue forcing many users to avoid using GPU encoding hardware for this very task. NVIDIA is now making the claim that their improved encoding engine offers better quality than software encoders, such as x264. That said, note that they used x264 at the "fast" setting for this comparison, which is not optimal for the highest quality by itself, though it remains fast enough for real-time encoding at 1080p. When it comes to 4K, even x264 in fast mode will result in dropped frames while NVENC will keep the CPU load low without missing any frames. So Turing should be a great choice for 4K streaming, while maximum quality offline encoding is still done best on the CPU, which is much slower, of course.

Turing's NVDEC video decoder engine has also been updated to support decoding of HEVC YUV444 at 10 and 12 bit HDR at 30 FPS, H.264 8K, and VP9 10/12b HDR.