SVO recording with SDK 5.2.2 + CUDA 13.2 + NVIDIA 595.79 broke H264/H265; Older GPU driver fixed it

Software
1

Great cameras and awesome SDK! I just wanted to post this in case it helps other users and helps narrow down a fix.

On Windows 11 Pro with ZED SDK 5.2.2, CUDA 13.2, and an RTX 4090 Laptop GPU, SVO recording was only working in LOSSLESS mode. All NVENC-based compression modes were failing:

  • H264

  • H265

  • H264_LOSSLESS

  • H265_LOSSLESS

The fix was to roll back the NVIDIA GPU driver from 595.79 to 581.57 Studio.

After the rollback, all 5 SVO recording modes validate and record correctly.

So this appears to be related to an NVIDIA driver / NVENC regression or compatibility issue affecting ZED SDK 5.2.2 with CUDA 13.2 on this setup, rather than a general SVO write failure.

I am posting this so others do not lose time chasing unrelated causes such as save path, permissions, USB bandwidth, or camera failure when LOSSLESS works but the GPU-based codecs do not.

System:

  • Windows 11 Pro

  • ZED SDK 5.2.2

  • CUDA 13.2

  • NVIDIA driver 595.79 = broken for GPU SVO codecs

  • NVIDIA driver 581.57 Studio = working

  • RTX 4090 Laptop GPU

It would be great if the SDK / Explorer could either:

  1. detect and warn about the NVENC failure more explicitly, or

  2. document known-bad driver branches if this is already understood internally.

Thank you.

2

Thanks for the report,

it’s a known compatiblity issue we noticed recently with GPU driver 590 and newer, a fix is planned for an upcoming patch ASAP