NVENC HEVC UHQ + highbitdept leads to artfiacts in ffmpeg with Blackwell

So the following combination seems to be bugged with Blackwell specifically. I tested RTX 3080 and RTX 5070 ti.

Encoding a H264 Video using the UHQ Tune in combination with "-highbitdepth 1” using FFMPEG.

Used a simple batch like this

"@echo off

ffmpeg ^
-i “test.mkv” ^
-c:v hevc_nvenc ^
-preset medium -tune uhq ^
-profile:v main10 -highbitdepth 1 ^
-bf 4 -b_ref_mode middle -rc-lookahead 32 ^
-b:v 2000k -maxrate 2000k -bufsize 4000k ^
-c:a copy ^
“test_ffmpeg_10bit_look32_uhq.mkv”

pause"

Only UHQ → no problem

Only highbitdepth 1 → no problem

Combining both with the 5070ti leads to heavy(!!) artifacts. Doing it in the same system with the RTX 3080 leads to no problem combining both. OS: Windows 11 Pro

I tried multiple ffmpeg versions: 7.1.1. and 8.0.1 and a snapshot version from Dec 8 2025. Always the same. Tried multiple drivers and the latest one. No change.

The 5070ti cannot combine both with FFMPEG where as the 3080 can. I contacted Timo Rothenpieler (dev at ffmpeg) and he says with that observation this is not an ffmpeg issue but an Nvidia issue. Here the link to the reported bug on the code.ffmpeg site: Making sure you're not a bot!

And this is how the artefacts look like (as I said only with the 5070ti combining uhq and highbitdepth regardless of driver and ffmpeg version - the 3080 is always fine regardless of combination; and also it is reproducable with any H264 Video I have!):

Thanks for reporting this issue. This issue is fixed and the fix will appear in the future driver release branch.

Tested it (January 24th 2026) with 591.74 which is the latest driver. Issue still persists. I assume it will be fixed in a later release then. Any potential idea to when or which driver branch version the fix will be implemented?

This issue is resolved and fix will be available in the next release branch.