NVENC working with steam on my Ubuntu and RTX 5070 TI
I added NVENC encoding support to the driver (totally vibecoded). Steam now picks up VAAPI HEVC automatically — no config needed, no env vars. Just launch Steam and stream.
If you've ever tried Steam Remote Play on NVIDIA Linux, you know the pain:
it falls back to libx264 software encoding because nvidia-vaapi-driver only supported decode. 20fps, unusable.
On Blackwell (RTX 50xx), NVIDIA killed 32-bit CUDA, which is exactly what Steam's encode pipeline needs. So the driver includes a 64-bit helper daemon that handles the NVENC work via shared memory.
Steam's 32-bit process writes frames, the 64-bit daemon encodes them on the GPU. Transparent to the user.
Results
^(RTX 5070 Ti, Ubuntu 24.04, driver 580)
- Steam Remote Play: VAAPI HEVC @ 60fps, ~3ms encode, 0% packet loss
- Tested with Steam Link on macOS and SteamOS on Legion Go 2
- ffmpeg h264_vaapi/hevc_vaapi work out of the box
- Pre-Blackwell GPUs (Turing/Ampere/Ada): direct NVENC, no daemon needed
Looking for testers, especially RTX 5070/5080/5090 before asking the maintainer.
To test
PR is open as draft on the original repo: https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver/pull/427
git clone https://github.com/efortin/nvidia-vaapi-drivercd nvidia-vaapi-drivergit checkout feat/nvenc-support
I removed the install.sh, instead follow the step-by-step guide for your distro: