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Stephen5C1C
Participant
November 17, 2020
Question

Media Encoder not using maximum GPU performance

  • November 17, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 5996 views

I hav i5 4570 16gb ram SSD and 3gb Gtx1060 Nvidia. When i activate mercury acceleration with cuda the render speeds dont even improve and the GPU will be operating at 5% o less the processor and ram will be less tha 80%. A 30sec project with basic 3D layers and camera depth of field takes 50minutes to render.

I have tried changing program setting in nvidia control panel for the app to use maximum performance and overclocked the card bt nothing changed.

What could be the problem?

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    3 replies

    R
    RjL190365
    Legend
    December 13, 2020

    Here's the issue:

     

    The rendering performance is only as good as the weakest link, in this instance. The CPU is very underpowered by current standards. And when a CPU is too weak, the GPU will just sit idle, waiting for the CPU to play catch-up. In fact, I would dare say that the GTX 1060, weak (by current standards) as it is, is still too much GPU for that 4-core/4-thread CPU.

    M
    meylorod
    Participant
    December 13, 2020

    I have an 8 core CPU, not a 4 core. Also, I installed Cuda Toolkit and that changed the balance of the CPU/GPU render percentages to 55% GPU and 20% CPU. There's still a lot of room for processor usage, especially in the CPU.

    R
    RjL190365
    Legend
    December 13, 2020

    My reply was to the original poster. That i5-4570 is only a 4-core CPU without multithreading capability.

     

    Even with heavy GPU effects, the GPU still sits nearly idle while the CPU gets slammed in that system. Exactly the opposite of what is happening in your PC.

     

    And under normal circumstances, if the GPU usage is too high for even a simple frame rate conversion while the CPU usage remains low, that is a sign that the GPU is too weak for the CPU.

    C
    Christopher Shipe
    Participating Frequently
    December 11, 2020

    I am not 100% sure, but I think the software of Media Encoder cannot maximize the GPU since it has to render frame by frame in certain scenarios. The reason it may be limited to frame by frame is because FRAME 2 may require the information of FRAME 1 to be finished before it can start processing/rendering itself (Unlike some projects where multiple frames can be rendered at once which gives you a faster export).

     

    An example would be like eased keyframes, to render a solid that is keyframed (eased) from one position to the next, I think the software can only make calculations about the solid's position in FRAME 2 based on where the solid was in FRAME 1.

     

    I am not sure if you are even using eased keyframes within your project, or if this limit just applies to keyframes in general but I remember reading somewhere that easing keyframes can affect export speed and I believe this was the reason why.  Hopefully there is some correlation haha, sorry for the long explanation if not.

     

    Long story short, it's a limit on the software rather than hardware... that's what I've got from what I've read.

    M
    meylorod
    Participant
    December 8, 2020

    Any luck with this issue? I am having similar problems. My CPU is at 100%, while the GPU is at 6% usage while rendering. 

     

     

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