VideoStudio Pro X5 - CUDA acceleration option greyed out

[alexreeves]

Hi all,

I've looked through previous forum posts and have found other people having similar problems but not yet seen any conclusive resolutions.

I have VideoStudio Pro X5 Ultimate (full paid for version) but I am unable to select the 'Enable Hardware Encoder Acceleration' option under Preferences/Performance as the option is greyed out.

I have an nVidia GTX660 Ti 3GB made by EVGA. This has a CUDA based CPU and according to Corel's advertising, VS Pro X5 is designed for this chipset, and so I cannot understand why the option to enable it is not available.

Some comments from Corel support I found on other posts suggest that this option isn't required for CUDA cards as they are enabled and used by default. However, I have just done a test render of a 1920x1080 AVI clip to MP4 using H.264 and monitored both my CPU (dual Xeon E5420) and GPU utilisation. The CPUs hit 90% whilst the GPUs sat there doing nothing at all other than basic screen rendering rather than any encoding. This would suggest Corel's comments are incorrect.

Also, I have a support case open with Corel but TBH, I don't hold out much hope as their last response was "If the hardware acceleration options are greyed out, then your graphics card software is managing the hardware acceleration. Please check with Nvidia whether there is an option to disable this. If there is, then once it is disabled, the hardware accelerations option will become active again.". Now, I don't pretend to be an expert in these matters, but I was under the impression that the hardware was enabled and managed by the drivers, and those drivers also offered out the functions of the card to other software that required it (API?), such as VS Pro when it needs access to the hardware acceleration to encode video. Graphics rendering on games works fine without me having to disable any graphics card software so why doesn't VS Pro?

For info, my hardware / OS is as follows:

Dual Xeon E5420 CPUs at 2.5Ghz (8 cores in total)
16GB RAM
EVGA nVidia GTX 660 Ti 3GB (with 310.61 beta drivers but still same issue with 306.97 release drivers)
240 GB Kingston SSD
Windows 7 64bit Ultimate with SP1

Has anyone else managed to get hardware acceleration enabled using a GTX 600 series card? Or has anyone else managed it on any other card that initially had the option greyed out?

I know that some people say that CPU rendering gives better quality, but I have a few hundred hours of old VHS and Video 8 tapes to transfer to digital and burn to DVD so as the quality isn't great to start with, I'm not too concerned about a few artifacts if I can significantly reduce the rendering time.

If I can't resolve this issue then I am going to claim a refund under Corel's 30 day money back guarantee as the product doesn't perform as advertised. However, I'd prefer to get it working as I quite like it.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks,

[QFAN]

Exactly same here. "Enable Hardware Encoder acceleration" is grey.

My video card is GTX 670, which supports CUDA absolutely.


My experience with corel customer service is really bad on this.

They keep giving me this link :http://corel.force.com/index/articles/e ... celeration
which is not Windows 7 but probably Vista, and also that is for a Vmware virtual video card that is basically equivalent to windows98 era video cards.

When I said that doesn't work they asked me to update driver, which I told them in the first first first ticket post that I have the latest driver.



They you guess what? They say your GTX 670 doesn't support hardware acceleration !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Natal]

Right click on your desktop.

Select "NVIDIA Control Panel"

Select "3D settings"

Select "Adjust image settings with preview" and see what is selected there. It will probably be "Use the advanced 3D image settings"

Click on "Manage 3D settings"

Click on the "Program settings" tab

Pull down the menu 1

Look for VS5 in that list and select it

Look for "Cuda -GPUs" on list 2. It will probably read something like "use global settings (all)". This is what you want.

If VS5 is not on menu 1, then:

Click on the "global settings" tab

Look at the "CUDA - GPUs" setting. It should read "all"

Click on the "all" and make sure that your graphics card is selected

(Global is the default if a specific program hasn't been assigned overide settings)

After that you should be good to go, and if the program can use CUDA, it will.

[alexreeves]

Natal - thanks for the suggestion. I'll give it a try over the weekend when I'm back home and will update this post with results.

Cheers.

[ffleader1]

Thank you for your post. Before i read it, I had some problems too. While rendering, my CPU hits 90-95 % load and GPU hits 0% . However, I go to Nvidia control pannel --> Manage 3D setting --> Program settings TAB --> select a program to customize --> Then I select Corel VideoStudio X5 (IT says the program name is space vision) --> Specify the setting for this program:
-CUDA-GPUs: Use these GPU, then I selected mine.
-Maximum pre-rendered frames: 8
APPLY
AND remember to enable all hardware acceleration (Desktop Properties --> setting --> Advanced --> troubleshoot --> slide the hardware acceleration bar to FULL) or the GPU will load 0% all the time.
And my GPU (Gt 210 lol, will get it replaced soon) loads 20-30% while rendering, making it 12% faster. I hope you have better result. Hope that help.

[alexreeves]

Well, I've checked my settings as per Natal's suggestion, and played around with other option as per ffleader1's sugegstion, but all to no avail. No matter what options I try, the Hardware Encoding option is still greyed out and the GPU utilisation stays at virtually zero whilst the CPU utilisation hit 85-90%. Thanks for your assistance guys - much appreciated and more useful that that received from Corel themselves!

The support I have had from Corel has been poor to say the least with no suggestions other than to try the latest drivers (suggestion from their level 2 support!). Jeez, they think I've not already tried that maybe? I've not had any further suggestions from them in over a week or even had a very simple and direct question answered about whether this software has actually been successfully tested on a GTX600 family GPU card, and so I have just raised an RMA to get a refund on this software under their Corel Advantage policy as it doesn't work as advertised and I don't have the time or desire to figure out why. It's installed on a newly built PC, with new drivers, and all my other software works fine with this card, so the problem must lie with VS Pro X5.

I will be buying CyberLink PowerDirector 11 as the trial version of that worked like a dream and was very fast when rendering (took less than half the time for the same render). However, I did actually prefer the interface and usability of VS Pro X5 hence I actually bought that instead, assuming that the fix would be simple. Ah well, lesson learned - buy the one that works rather than the one that looks pretty!!

Hope other people affected have more success.

Cheers.

[phaseman]

Install CUDA toolkits, helped me, might help you.

https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-31-downloads

Cheers
Gripps

[alexreeves]

Thanks for the suggestion Phaseman.

I've downloaded and installed the toolkit successfully but still no improvement with hardware encoding in VideoStudio. The option is still greyed out and the GPU still stays at 0% when rendering whilst the CPU is c.85-90%.

Is there anything else that you did once you'd installed the toolkit and applied the drivers from the toolkit? What graphics card did you have that the toolkit helped with? I'm starting to wonder if the GTX660 GPUs have ever even been tested with VS X5, and Corel won't confirm despite me asking twice.

Surely things shouldn't be this difficult to get working!

[ffleader1]

Use Vegas 12.
It's good.
I cannot use it because of my Stupid window XP.
Oh and does VS X5 support OPENGL of AMD?

[alexreeves]

I tried Vegas Pro 12 trial and quite liked it but didn't like the almost £400 GBP price tag it came with!! That's too much for a bit of home video editing

Still getting nowhere with Corel support. Posted a comment on their FB page and got a response later that day to say my case had been passed to level 3 support and that I'd hear from them soon. Top marks for Corel's social media team for their fast response. Unfortunately that was six days ago and still no update on the issue from the support team.

Time to give up on Corel, get a refund, and buy software that works as advertised. Very unimpressed with Corel - I expected more

[Natal]

I did some tests. On my alternate computer (which has VS4 on it) equiped with a Radeon HD 7870 the option can be ticked off but there is no activity observable from the card.

On my main computer equiped with a nVidia 680 the encoding option is greyed out (you can tick the decoder however). When you encode you can see some activity from the card, BUT it is very low, about 1%. Replaying the video increases it to about 3%. So, even thought it is greyed out it is still using the video card, just not as much as you might think.

You need to remember that even with GPU acceleration, most of the work is done by the CPU. The GPU is used to accelerate some functions of the encoding, but that part is apparently small.

Btw, I have Premier Pro 6.0 as well, if I do encoding with that program there is no observable activity in the GPU at all during encoding. But, if I play the preview screen, then GPU activity jumps to 7-8%.

My understanding that CUDA is used to accelerate re-rendering on the fly during playback to make editing of footage easier.

While both VS and PP6 use the video card in similar ways (very little during encoding, a bit more during playback) the amount of usage as measured by monitors is small.

What you need to do is look at how long it takes to encode a particular file, not how much activity you see on your CPU/GPU monitor.

One more thing, PP6 uses all 4 cores of my i7 at 100%, with both threads on each core fully utilized. VS is very different - it appears not to make use of hyperthreading and uses each core at around 25%, which seems a little curious. In other words you probably won't see much difference between an i5 and and i7. I have a hyperthreaded dual core i3 3225 on my file server and a dual core i7 on my laptop, I think I should install a copy of VS on those computers and see how well they work.

[geoffschultz]

As an FYI, I have a GTX650 on a Core I7 Windows 8 system and I've got the exact same symptoms that everyone else does. I never see the GPU being used at all for anything that I use VS for. I will say that based upon comments that I've read elsewhere, I suspect that certain filters that are GPU aware and not VS.

-- Geoff

[Natal]

Before you say it is not being used, be sure that really is true by seeing how long it takes to encode with the card enabled or disabled.

The activity shown by monitoring programs may not give an accurate reflection. As I pointed out, PP6 (which uses cards for sure) shows no activity either.

[DV2FOX]

Well,let me tell you you guys about my experience,but first of all,here's my PC Specs

CPU: Intel i5 2500K (Sandy Bridge 2nd gen i think)
GPU: nVidia GIGABYTE 660GTX Ti OC 2GB
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bits (The 4 cores from the CPU are ACTIVATED in msconfig )
1TB Western Digital Blue HDD

I'm coming from Sony Vegas Pro 11 ..Before i had (and still have) a nVidia GIGABYTE 460GTX 1GB GPU ...whenever i coded with VP11 anything i just picked up a video format Internet 720 HD quality and that's it,no advanced options..and it worked like a charm (64bits exclusive program + GPU = --> ) ,rendering a video from 15 minutes in dont know..5-7 minutes.

But then i've changed my GPU to the 660GTX Ti OC 2GB i've mentioned above,thinking "this is gonna be a BLAST"...NOT....Whenever i went to render again on VP11 i got an "Undetermined Error" ..Error..no matter wich Enccoding option i've chosen,except,ofcourse, CPU Only,but that,obviously,made the entire coding SLOW AS HELL (15 minutes in...30-40 minutes?!) and that's a NO NO...same thing happend with VP12

So i've been told "Try Corel VideoStudio Pro x5" and so i did because,at the program's specifications it mentioned "32 and 64bit"...just as i started and registered the program (iffff you know what i mean,Mr Bean...) i've noticed that the installation made the program get installed in my 32bit folder (Tsk tsk tsk,bad liar Corel for once)

Anyways,ontopic..I directly went to the program's Configuration->Preferences(F6 key) and to the "Render" tab (note that my version is in spanish,so things might sound differente) and my surprise is...All the "Edition process,File Creation and Rendering Optimization" 's boxes were AVALIABLE to be TICKED..so i ticked them all and encoding a MPEG4 video 1280x720 with a 9 minute lenght tooked just 6 minutes...Wow?,i don't know,could be faster,since i've monitored my CPU/GPU and the CPU was 95-100% (all 4 cores were going crazy) while my GPU was just...20% max..i don't know why my GPU couldn't go further and help more?

The thing is that i've been reading this topic you guys have been writting about with "i can't tick my settings" and i don't know what could be wrong..the thing is,i haven't touched anything from my nVidia's Control Panel and i got able to tick those boxes

My question afterall is...Is there any way to improve the rendering SPEED so it takes LESS TIME using the power of my GPU and CPU at the same time WITHOUT OVER CLOCKING THE GPU NOR THE CPU ?

Thanks in advance,hopefully this has been of any help with you guys and resolve this problem..but also please help me so i can render stuff too

Here's a video showing off the encoding of BORDERLANDS 2 used with my Specs and MPEG4 720p with Corel VideoStudio x5 pro...the thing is..i see many squares as if my encoding wasn't properly configured ..Watch in 720p,that's why

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hckKgbxo ... FQ&index=1

[kodl]

Hello,

in other topic we could share our experience with graphics card and it's HW encoding capability in CVS.
See http://forum.corel.com/EN/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=50119

Cheers.

kodl