Clarification of Minimum Nvidia card required by MEP Premium 21.0.1.87

Former user wrote on 10/2/2021, 4:34 AM

Hi Folks

With the new MEP Premium 21.0.1.87, I notice that the minimum system requirements states the following:

“INFUSION Engine 3 supports video acceleration for AVC and HEVC on Intel, NVIDIA .........with 1 GB VRAM or higher
Example: Intel Graphics HD 630, NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1050, AMD Radeon RX470

It's easy to deduce from that statement that in order for MEP 21.0.1.87 to utilise your Nvidia card, it has to be a GTX1050 or above.

However, because of the inclusion of the word “Example”, I am reading the following"

In order for MEP 21.0.1.87 to utilise your Nvidia card, it has to be one with at least 1 gig of vram. An example of such a card is the GTX1050.

Now I have a GTX960 card with 2gig of Vram on it. Under Settings > device options, I have set all three items under Hardware acceleration to the GTX960. I have a intel i5 4670 CPU, but I have disable the 4600 iGPU in the BIOS. I needed to have it enabled on previous versions of MEP to get Hardware accelerated exports - even though I had the same Nvidia GPU.

When I do an MP4 or an HVEC export from MEP , the export progress dialogue box indicates that Hardware acceleration is being used for the export. The export process is considerably faster than using the CPU. Also, GPUz indicates that the GPU on the GTX960 is indeed being utilised during the export.

So I think what is more critical is the amount of Vram on your Nvida card - even if it is not a GTX1050. Just because have you something less than a GTX1050, does not mean you can’t get Hardware accelerated exports with MEP.

Comments

AAProds wrote on 10/2/2021, 9:39 AM

@Former user That is great info, thanks for posting.

CubeAce wrote on 10/2/2021, 10:18 AM

@Former user @AAProds

Hi.

You should check what is actually happening using Task Manager to monitor while exporting.

While the program indicates hardware acceleration is in use the nvidia card may only be hardware rendering 3D content and not video encode or video decode.

While I agree the amount of vram seems to help with the speed so does the generation of vram as well as the architecture within the GPU. Turing chip architecture currently can do the whole works whereas Pascal doesn't seem to do as much. Even then things are not equal depending on the amount of pixel shaders and rops the chip has enabled. Some same generation GPUs have the same architecture but have been firmware updated to disable an amount of the internals so can be sold as a lower end performing card. A good example of this is the nvidia 1660ti which has a fully enabled chip compared to my 1650Super which has around a third of its innards disabled and 2GB less ram.

Also MEP seems to keep some GPU performance in reserve until you get to more insane resolutions and larger Mbps files. The export is then not rendered any faster for a given GPU but boy does the card go into overdrive.

Exporting at an average frame bit rate of 78Mbs at 4K

Ray.

johnebaker wrote on 10/2/2021, 1:39 PM

@Former user

In addition to your comment on VRAM on the GPU it is also necessary to check the Nvidia specs or GPU matrix for the GPU you have, knowing the chip model helps, to see if it can handle the import and export formats that you want to use.

John EB