dedicated video helpful?

[intrusdave]

Good morning. I just finished building my Blue Iris system. I currently have 5 of my 8 cameras installed. They are 2MP Hikvision. I'm running them at 15fps, max resolution.
My box is a Core i7-6700k, 8GB DDR4. System and DB drive is an NVMe SSD, video storage is on a 4TB striped drive.

Currently, it's sitting at about 50% CPU load, little to no heat.

I was curious if adding an nVidia GT 710 will help or hurt. Will I lose the use of the Intel QuickSync?

TIA

Dave

 

[intrusdave]

To answer my own question.. Interesting results. Initially the CPU load 30%, then jumped to 75%. Removing it returned the CPU load to the 50's.

 

[bp2008]

It sounds like you probably inadvertently disabled the intel GPU by adding the nvidia card. Luckily, often you can force the intel GPU to be enabled in your BIOS. If you don't have a monitor connected to the onboard ports anymore, you may need to "fake" a display to make quick sync available: Fake connect a Monitor

Anyway, the nvidia card is only worth it if you are running a very high resolution monitor (bigger than 1920x1080 I'd say), because the only part it will help with is drawing video to the screen. On my 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 monitors, I saw a pretty significant rise in CPU usage when I opened the Blue Iris GUI, and an nvidia card significantly reduced how much the CPU usage rose. But I was also using an older intel CPU (i7-3770K) so it could be that there won't be as much of a difference with a skylake chip.

You should not be seeing anywhere near a 50% CPU load with only 5x 2MP cameras at 15 FPS. Make sure you have direct-to-disk recording enabled for all the cameras, and have hardware accelerated h264 decoding enabled, but not "VPP" (VPP is an optional part of hardware acceleration that actually makes things worse if you have more than a few cameras).

I run something crazy like 580 megapixels per second (you can see this in the Blue Iris status window) on my i7-3770k, outputting to a 4K monitor and I see 50% CPU load. Your load should be about 150 megapixels per second, so your CPU usage should be like to 5-10% assuming your monitor isn't huge like mine.

 

[fenderman]

Running the demo instead of the licensed version and/or not setting the cameras to record direct to disk will cause this...

 

[intrusdave]

I have an active license. All cameras are direct-to-disk.
Correction to my first post. Cameras are 4MP. it's running about 305MP/s.
Each camera has has hardware decoding (no VPP) and the system is set for h264.

 

[fenderman]

I have an active license. All cameras are direct-to-disk.
Correction to my first post. Cameras are 4MP. it's running about 305MP/s.
Each camera has has hardware decoding (no VPP) and the system is set for h264.

Even at 5x4mp cameras your load should be about 15 percent or less...

 

[intrusdave]

This is really frustrating. Each cam is adding 10%. If I shutdown BI and restart it, I get about 3 minutes at 20%, then it jumps back up to 50~55%

are there better cam settings I should be using? Main/High profile, constant/vbr?

 

[bp2008]

I suggest high profile when it is available and compatible, and constant/CBR. I've seen VBR have quality issues on some cameras.

What resolution is the monitor you are showing BI on? As I've said, the higher the display resolution, the more CPU cost there is to display the video. If you run BI in service mode (GUI closed) then it should settle close to 15% as fenderman has said. Other than that I am not sure what would cause such inflated CPU usage.

Where specifically are you getting the CPU usage number? Look at blueiris.exe in the Details tab in task manager.

 

[intrusdave]

Thank you for the help guys.

After some deep digging I found some more info on Intel QuickSync. One detail that I left out at the start was that I first was running on Windows Server 2008 R2 (dedicated box), then moved to Windows 7 when I couldn't get the CPU load down. After giving up I figured that I would try Windows 10. I'm an IT manager and I *HATE* windows 10... so it was a last resort. But after enough digging I found that QuickSync doesn't appear to work with Windows 7.

After install Win 10, and all of it's updates, I have it running at about 25% load, 40Mbps bandwidth. I do have a 4k LCD that I am running it on. Tomorrow I'll try putting the Nvidia back in to see if I can get that a bit lower. I know now that the GUI is most of my load, as running BI as a service gives me about 7% load.

 

[bp2008]

Not bad. 7% is better than I anticipated.

You should be able to cut some off of that 25% with the nvidia card. I wonder how much exactly you will save.

Also, you can use an app like GPU-Z to look at GPU usage for the intel and nvidia chips and make sure both have some usage, to know when each is working. You should find some activity on the Intel adapter at all times and the Nvidia only when the Blue Iris GUI is open.

 

[nayr]

dont put the nvidia back, it'll just increase your power consumption.. your loads are perfect as they are.

discrete video card fans are one of the most common points of failure too..

 

[intrusdave]

Thanks for the GPU-Z heads up. I had forgotten about that utility. The GT710 appears to be a wash. it is a very low power card, and is fanless, it drops the CPU load about 5~7%. The overall power usage is almost identical. Overall I'm really happy with the system now.

My next challenge is getting it to record the way I want. I *thought* that I had every camera configured identical, but only one is doing "time-laps". And I don't know what I did, but my timeline no longer shows the event marks.