UI3 blank screen on play clip - related to my Nvidia GEForce GT1030 card?

[marklyn]

I have a fresh 2 week build of Windows 11, i7-4730 machine with a fresh install of BI (registry restore) and an Nvidia GT1030 card.
When I built this box I expected to install Nvidia driver/software but Windows 11 included the Nvidia control panel (v 8.1.962.)
All in all everything worked great. I double checked that all of my cameras were set to Nvidia. No further changes were needed for BI since the registry restore of the settings was fine.
Today, as I viewing clips via UI3 on a local networked computer when I hover over a clip it briefly displays the thumnail preview then goes blank; when I click on it the whole clip is blank.
I checked my log and see a high count of "HW encode setup failed..." for all the times today that I clicked on a clip and it was blank.
Everytime I clicked on a clip, it would count one more up in the log.
I re-checked my cameras this was happening on (seemed random) and they were all set to Nvidia decode as expected.
As a test, I changed two cameras temporarily to intel decoding and restarted my UI3 screen. Clips played fine at that point!?
I rebooted the computer and they all seem to be working again through the UI3 (playing clips). No blank screens.
Should I chalk this up to an accepted one off glitch which a reboot fixes? I'd still really like to know why I got so many hardware decode errors so any ideas or thoughts would be welcome.
Seems to me that since I temporarily changed two cameras to intel decoding that something is wonky with Nividia?

 

[bp2008]

If it doesn't happen again, I would not worry about it.

You should look in Task Manager on the Performance tab and see what the different GPU usage stats are. Particularly the Video Decode usage graph and the video memory usage, those are the ones that usually max out first in my experience. If either of them gets close to fully saturated, it could cause additional hardware decoding operations to fail.

It might also help to install Nvidia drivers from their website. Whatever Windows installed may be out of date.

FYI, Intel's hardware acceleration is a great deal more energy-efficient than Nvidia's, so if it works reliably, it is the best option to choose. With your older CPU you can't accelerate H.265 streams but it should work fine for H.264. Nvidia's can actually be worse than software decoding in terms of energy consumption.

 

[marklyn]

I was kind of hoping someone would say that
After I rebuilt I checked the ver of Nvidia installed with Windows 11 against Nvidia's current site and the version of the control panel was the same.
My current Nvidia drivers show v. 27.21.14.5671 with a date of 09/30/2020
I didn't see an obvious place just for driver updates on their site though.
I will consider what you said about the intel's acceleration though. I switched to a NVIDIA card because I was getting a lot of cam timeouts on the Intel motherboard GPU.
After I switched out I went ahead and changed all of the cameras to use dual stream as suggested in one of the wiki's.

 

[marklyn]

I did another pass on the Nvidia website. Only downloads I see related to my GT1030 is a 511mb download, which must be another control panel and current drivers, I'm guessing.
Wonder if I can extract just the drivers from that and use that small piece or if it will cause any problems to install all of it.
all of the drivers listed are "game ready" like below...
GEFORCE GAME READY DRIVER - WHQL
Driver Version: 511.79 - Release Date: Mon Feb 14, 2022

 

[marklyn]

I was able to download the driver file, launch it, and copy the driver folder to another location (for safekeeping).
I then used device manager and successfully updated the drivers from that folder. Now my driver version is 20.0.15.1179 with a 02/10/2022 driver date.
I'll report back if the issue arises again.
Thanks.

 

[bp2008]

I've never had to install a graphics driver from Windows device manager. That should not be necessary.

Drivers are found on Nvidia's homepage, just follow the drivers link in the upper right and enter your product information.



The latest version is 511.79 released about 2 weeks ago. You already found it of course, but here's a direct link so you can see exactly where I download drivers from: GeForce Game Ready Driver | 511.79 | Windows 10 64-bit, Windows 11 | NVIDIA

The download is ridiculously huge, partly because they support a LOT of different graphics card models with each driver, and there are game profiles and whatnot in there. And partly because they bundle in the Geforce Experience app which I consider to be basically bloatware. I prefer to do a custom install and unselect the bloat.

To see what version you have, go to the lower right of Nvidia Control Panel:

 

[marklyn]

Ahh, I think I got it all sorted now. Thanks for your help BP2008