Sustainable Real-Time 8K60 HEVC Encoding for V2X: Repurposing Legacy NVENC Hardware at the Vehicular Edge

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that legacy NVIDIA Pascal GPUs can be repurposed for real-time 8K60 HEVC encoding at the vehicular edge, offering a sustainable, cost-effective, and energy-efficient solution for V2X communications.

Contribution

It introduces a method to achieve ultra-low-latency 8K HEVC encoding using legacy GPUs, highlighting their efficiency and suitability for modern vehicular edge applications.

Findings

Repurposed Pascal GPUs achieve real-time 8K60 HEVC encoding with minimal rate-distortion penalty.

Fewer CUDA cores in Pascal GPUs lead to higher energy efficiency and lower power waste.

Pascal's HEVC architecture aligns well with ultra-low-latency V2X pipelines despite generational differences.

Abstract

The rapid advancement of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications and Tele-Operated Driving (ToD) demands ultra-low-latency, 8K60 video telemetry. However, deploying modern hardware at the vehicular edge is frequently hindered by supply chain constraints, high power budgets, and growing e-waste concerns. This paper investigates a highly sustainable alternative: repurposing legacy NVIDIA Pascal GPUs for real-time 8K HEVC edge encoding. We demonstrate that triggering 2-Way Split Frame Encoding (SFE) on dual-NVENC GP104 and GP102 silicon successfully unlocks real-time 8K60 throughput with a negligible Rate-Distortion penalty of under 1%. Crucially, our micro-architectural analysis reveals that smaller GPU dies significantly outperform larger flagship models in both raw throughput and energy efficiency. Because fixed-function encoding forces general-purpose Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) cores to sustain maximum frequencies while remaining idle, GPUs with fewer CUDA cores waste drastically less power. While benchmarking against the state-of-the-art RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell highlights a generational compression efficiency gap, Pascal's functional HEVC architecture and native lack of B-frames align perfectly with ultra-low-latency V2X pipelines. Ultimately, repurposed mid-range Pascal GPUs present a highly capable, cost-effective, and e-waste mitigating solution for modern Intelligent Transportation Systems.