My company uses NVIDIA GPUs in an OEM Encoder to leverage realtime NVENC GPU encoding. When our customers play content encoded with nvenc_hevc on very bright LED walls / screens, regions of the video with a lot of black / dark content are noticeably and distractingly blocky and jumpy. Our previous generation encoder uses libx264 for encoding, and this is not a problem with videos encoded at the same bitrate. I understand there is a significant difference between CPU and GPU encoding, but the amount of blockiness and jumpiness with the blacks seems to be quite a significant problem with nvenc when watching on bright screens / in bright venues.
Oddly, the nvenc_h264 encoder seems to have this problem slightly less. I have attached some sample videos encoded with libx264, nvenc_h264, nvenc_hevc for comparison which you can download here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S3WZRk8RcfmZ5w9FEVyWU4KJ0HDJJzGL/view?usp=sharing.
Note: If you are viewing from a standard computer monitor, you will likely have to turn your screen brightness and contrast to 100% to see what I am talking about (what our customers see on LED walls).
The video bitrate of nvenc_hevc has to be nearly double that of libx264 to achieve a quality of blacks (i.e., steadiness) that is acceptable when compared to libx264. Is there any hope of improving the quality of the blacks with a software update, or is the hardware encoder chip pretty much set for good?
Thank you for your help!