Anyone else lose Quick Sync when the monitors go to sleep? How to keep QS on when monitors switch off?

[Ruri Hoshino]

New build (11th gen i5-11400) on a MSI z590 mobo with a discrete nvidia 950 card, blue iris 5.5.3.0. Two monitors, one plugged into motherboard (to trigger the Quick Sync) and one into nvidia card (because the monitor only has dvi output). h264 hikvision and dahua cams.

"I" shows for all cameras under HA, everything runs smoothly at about 5% or less cpu - when the monitors are still ON. But the moment the screens turn off, the web interface (either on phone, or on another network PC) drops frames and lags to hell. Move the mouse a little to come back from sleep and everything is back to normal, no frame drop.

To test if "N" acceleration works better, I switched all the cameras to Nvidia acceleration ("N" under HA) and the frame drops don't happen when the monitors go offline.

This frame drop only happens when it's under Intel Quick Sync acceleration... which admittedly isn't even necessary given the surplus cpu cycles. I'm just kinda curious WHY this happens. Is this a Blue Iris thing? Or some Win 10 thing? Is it somehow due to having both a discrete Nvidia card while using QS? The BIOS (latest firmware) does have "iGPU multi monitor" Enabled.

 

[wittaj]

Many here have experienced weird issues with hardware acceleration with recent BI updates (since DeepStack was introduced).

However, since substreams were introduced to BI, the need for hardware acceleration has dropped significantly (may only save a % or 2 now), so a lot of people have quit using hardware acceleration.

So either go with Nvidia or don't run hardware acceleration, especially with that machine!

 

[Ruri Hoshino]

Final update just in case someone else had the same problem: never figured out specifically how to fix it, but I did manage the obvious workaround: just keep the monitors on 24/7. With Windows Power config Monitor timeout set to Never and then the physical buttons on below the screens pressed, they are technically on yet not showing anything. This keeps hardware acceleration on 100% of the time too.

I tried reinstalling everything, installing Intel Media SDK (it solved a similar issue for someone else apparently), removing the Nvidia card entirely, downgrading/upgrading Blue Iris, etc. Only the always-on-monitor trick worked. Then I put the Nvidia card back in to install Deepstack for GPU on it so all the cameras are using QuickSync while the AI analysis is using the Nvidia card and there's plenty of CPU power left over to host the Plex server. Done.

As an aside, the monitors in question are 10-15+ yrs old and don't have actual HDMI or DisplayPort connectors so they're using DVI to HDMI adapters, and I do wonder if this is the real culprit... but not about to upgrade them when they're not in use 99% of the time.