Hardware Acceleration

Norsk Studio can offload encoding and decoding to an NVIDIA GPU or a Netint Quadra card. Under Norsk CTL the accelerator is chosen per instance, when you launch it — it is no longer something baked into how the whole stack starts.

See what the machine has

norsk-ctl get hardware

Launch an instance with an accelerator

norsk-ctl instance launch-template my-studio \
  --template studio-examples \
  --hardware nvidia

--hardware takes:

  • nvidia — reserve an NVIDIA GPU. The host needs the NVIDIA Container Toolkit.

  • quadra — reserve a Netint Quadra card. The host needs the Quadra drivers.

  • none — no reservation. This is the default.

The reservation applies to that instance’s media container, so two instances on the same machine can make different choices.

Notes

  • Both accelerators are Linux-only.

  • Install the drivers and the container runtime integration on the host before launching with --hardware; Norsk CTL reserves the device, it does not install anything for you.

  • Without --hardware, Norsk Media runs CPU-only.