I can now use HWA in PD after Hardare-accelerated GPU scheduling

pmikep wrote on 11/24/2020, 10:58 PM

Hi Guys:

I just posted this news in the CL forum, for their PD 18 product. I thought that, since their product can now access Nvidia's HW acceleration (even when an Intel iGPU is present), perhaps MEP's behavior might change too.

So, I recently upgraded Win10 to 2004.

2004 offers a new feature called Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling.

I also updated my nVidia driver to the 457.30 Studio driver, which supports H-a GPU Scheduling. (Although whether it's the first driver to do so, I do not know.)

Then, on a whim, I changed the Graphics Settings for PD 18 to High Performance. And, viola!, PD 18 now lets me use HWA for encoding.

Now, I know that MEP doesn't support HWA for encodes. Still, since the GPU Scheduling changed things in PD, I thought perhaps you all (Ray) might want to play with these changes to see if it makes any differences in MEP.

(I would offer, but am getting ready to travel for the N. American Thanksgiving Day holiday.)

Comments

CubeAce wrote on 11/25/2020, 3:40 AM

@pmikep

Hi Mike.

Glad to see you are OK as we hadn't heard from you for a while and was mentioning this to John EB the other day. Funnily while also talking about I had noticed changes to the way Windows 10 Enterprise seemed to be working now with my copy of Cubase running more efficiently.

I have been running more tests since with MEP, VPX, and Vegas and I'm finding with all three, that now setting them to 'Let Windows Decide' to be of most benefit. Mostly for smoothness of playback as it doesn't seem to effect export times in any significant way except in Vegas which has sped it up but by how much I'm not sure as I've only recently tried Vegas. What I have noticed is the amount of power being used now is quite a bit less as distribution of tasks seems to be more equalled out. None of my components are getting above 46 celcius and my CPU is only drawing 48 watts maximum during exporting rather than the previous 104 watts maximum. nvidia card temperature is also down averaging 35C during exporting. The other thing I notice is how different the distribution of work is depending on export file type and most of all, frame sizes.

The other thing I've been looking at is how differently different NLEs' are designed to work and the associated machine spec needs, and they vary a lot depending on how the NLE is designed to work.

When you have time you might want to read this article from one of the DaVinci Resolve Design team. It makes for a very interesting read with his take on not needing a very powerful system which at his base level seems to be a somewhat more powerful system than mine.

Ray.

johnebaker wrote on 11/25/2020, 5:10 AM

@pmikep

Hi Mike

Good to hear from you again.

I have just rebuilt my PC after big issues with upgrading Windows and running out of storage space necessitating a total re-install of OS and programs, independently came to the same conclusion as @CubeAce comment about letting Windows decide which GPU to use. The most beneficial export format is HEVC where the load is shared by both GPU processors.

Now if Magix would just get rendering MP4 and AVCHD available on an non integrated GPU then there would be a lot of very happy people.

John EB