Constant video artifacts and ghosting

It appears you are pulling substream 2 in BI - a lot of cameras have a higher resolution for substream 2 - take a look at switching to substream 1 and/or also reducing the bitrate for the substream and see if that is the compromise to fix the issue and lower CPU.

What is the correct path for substream 1? /Streaming/Channels/101?
 
I do not have a Hik camera, but most cameras have 0 as the main and 1 as substream 1, so looking at your screenshot, then yes I would think 101 would be substream 1
 
Are the cameras connected to the router or a switch?

And is it happening in both Blue Iris and watching it on the camera GUI?

Is there an SD card in the camera that you can see a recent playback and if it is doing the same thing?

If it is just in Blue Iris, then change Hardware Acceleration to none both in the global camera setup and in each individual camera setting - perhaps something got buggy loading on to the new computer.

Have you tried rolling back to an earlier version?
 
The cameras are connected to an access switch that is also POE. The BI server is also connected to the same switch. There are no SD cards in the cameras. I tried playing back the recording via app and in BI on the server, and the artifacts are visible both ways. I can rollback but not exactly sure what version I should go back to. I can try and explicitly disable the hardware acceleration.
 
I would try the disable HA first - I am thinking it is that after seeing everything else you tried.
 
HA was not enable in the Cameras tab under the settings. I also explicitly disabled it per camera now, although I don't see how that will make a difference since I have no hardware that supports HA in the server.
 
The recent updates have been problematic for many people. If a bug got in that was trying to run HA even though it said disabled. People have been reporting a wide array of issues with some recent updates and that was one that corrected it. Another instance someone changing the bitrate of the audio fixed problems that resulted from recent updates.