Update of update: I was wrong. From the beginning. The issue with NVenc is neither with the kernel nor with the NVIDIA driver. What a strange coincidence that 2 other programs I use with CUDA also have problems that are apparently completely unrelated to the driver. After many hours of trying different kernels and drivers I despaired and decided to rollback to my snapshot from November 2020 (kernel 5.9). The issue was gone. After some careful upgrading of single packages and checking if the issue reappeared I have now narrowed it down to some 50 packages from packman. I believe the culprit is most likely ffmpeg or some library it depends on. If you want to check if you are also affected, try issuing this command on some video file: ffmpeg -hwaccel cuda -hwaccel_output_format cuda -i video.mkv -c:v h264_nvenc -b:v 5M test.mp4 If you are affected ffmpeg should complain about some cuda error if I remember correctly, if not it should just convert the video without problems. Nevertheless I now feel more confident in dealing with NVIDIA issues, so thanks everyone for the kind help!