Just recently I've had my streams disconnect after at time. The time varies from 10 mins to an hour, you never know. I've been checking settings and logs adn obxerved that if I have the 'Use Hardware Encoder' box checked in the stream settings, even though I have the bitrate set at 2.5mbs, when I view the status it is only showing 450kbs bitrate. That is reflected in the error message I'm getting from YouTube stating that my feed to them is too low. When I uncheck the 'Use Hardware Encoder' box I can achieve a bit rate of 4mbs with no problem. Might even be able to go higher but just didn't try.
The system uses an Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 and the GPU memory rarely ever goes above 10%. It is also running 5 NDI camera feeds into the box. When the bitrate is low, I can go to speedtest.net and it shows an upload speed of 54Mbs so I know I have network headroom.

Also, I am using FFMPEG as the encoder application. Could this be a graphics driver problem or do I just continue to not use the hardware encoder and not worry?

Thanks for any ideas.