I dug into this a little more, using Tumbleweed this time (and obs installed through packman, per the directions from obs studio site for OpenSUSE) - since that seems more useful to this discussion. This time with the following setup: ... info: Loading up OpenGL on adapter NVIDIA Corporation NVIDIA Quadro T1000/PCIe/SSE2 info: OpenGL loaded successfully, version 3.3.0 NVIDIA 465.19.01, shading language 3.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler ... The build for ffmpeg doesn't completely seem necessary, the command I used for /usr/bin/ffmpeg vs. /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg seems to produce the same result(s). I would get a "[h264 @ 0x558c36c64ec0] No decoder surfaces left" error with "-hwaccel_output_format cuda" unless I add "-extra_hw_frames 2" - in some cases I had to bump it up to "3" - to have that error go away. Seems I can leave that out entirely if I use "hevc_nvenc" vs. "h264_nvenc". I also properly (I think) installed the v11.3.1 SDK, something I certainly didn't go in Arch. This took me from 465.31 down to 465.19.01, but I didn't see a version available for 465.31. https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads So I don't know what the most important aspect to this is - maybe the CUDA SDK? - but it _seems_ like it's working in some capacity.