Nvidia has quietly removed some of the concurrent video encoding limitations from its consumer graphics processing units, so they can now encode up to five simultaneous streams. The move may simplify the life of video enthusiasts, but Nvidia's data center grade and professional GPUs will continue to have an edge over consumer products as now Nvidia does not restrict the number of concurrent sessions on them. Obviously, the speed of encoding can suffer with more simultaneous encodes.
Nvidia has increased the number of concurrent NVENC encodes on consumer GPUs from three to five, according to the company's own Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix. This is effective for dozens of products based on the Maxwell 2nd Gen, Pascal, Turing, Ampere, and Ada Lovelace microarchitectures (except for some MX-series products) and released in the last eight years or so.
The number of concurrent NVDEC decodes isn't restricted, though if you're after real-time decoding, there are limits to how many streams can be handled at once. Nvidia provides a table showing the relative decode speeds of various GPUs by codec, though it doesn't indicate the resolution of those streams. Still, even second generation Maxwell GPUs could do over 400 fps of decode, enough for at least six simultaneous 1080p (?) streams — assuming you don't run out of VRAM.
