regarding nvidia ‘locking’
the locking only affects the ENCoder, which is the relatively easy part (cpu’s have been doing x264 encoding for years now).
the (4k x265) DEcoding is the hard part, and that part hasn’t been locked.
so locked or unlocked, the 4k/x265 decoding is the important part and i’d expect the (decoding) performance should similar across same level hardware.
What so far seems to be a more limiting factor to consider (as far as linux nvidia decoding), is that VRAM usage is much higher than windows.
linux nvidia 4k/x265 decoding appears to use ~1gig of video ram per decode. So this means cards with less ram, may not have sufficient ram available to do more than 1 or 2 decodes at a time, regardless of hardware performance.
Whether this is due to NVDEC support being incomplete, or the decoding path differences between linux and windows, remains unknown at this point.
If you haven’t already read the thread @ Hardware Accelerated Decode (Nvidia) for Linux I would recommend you to do so.
