NVENC and 416.16 release drivers

In the 416.16 release notes it stated “In the NVIDIA driver, Release 415 and later, the behavior of the Video Codec SDK API (NvEncCreateBitstreamBuffer) has been changed to return NV_ENC_ERR_UNIMPLEMENTED instead of NV_ENC_SUCCESS when the encoder instance is configured to run in the motion estimation-only mode.” For products like Cyberlink PowerDirector that utilized the H.264 Motion Estimation (ME) only Mode for GPU encoding, they now no longer have the encoding capability with this driver. The GPU encoding feature is disabled within PowerDirector, presumably from the documented change in NvEncCreateBitstreamBuffer behavior. Reverting back to the previous Nvidia driver reestablishes GPU encoding capability within PowerDirector.

Is this a permanent driver change going forward such that software like PowerDirector will no longer be able to utilize the GPU for encoding without modification being done by Cyberlink to address this change in Nvidia driver behavior?