VS Pro x4: Hardware Acceleration Is Not Working

[EdwardERS]

My questions are about why Hardware Acceleration appears to not be working and why my CPU isn't being better utilized while rendering 720p videos.

So I found out that there are options for Hardware Decoder and Encoder Acceleration. The editing process decoder acceleration had been enabled the whole time since installing, but the two under file creation where left unchecked. I proceed to check them and tried to render a video, to which I saw no difference in CPU usage in task manager or GPU usage in MSI Afterburner. You can see my SPECs to the right. Aren't my Sandy Bridge i5 and AMD 6870 1GB compatible with hardware acceleration?

Another thing. When I render a 720p video the CPU usage is usually around 50-70%. More or less it doesn't look like it's being fully utilized. When I render a 1080p video the usage is around 70-9x%. which looks like it is being fully utilized. Why is the 720p video rendering not using more of my CPU?

I had a thought while I was typing this that maybe the write speed of my drive is to blame. I've been rendering videos to a 3TB WD Caviar Green. Is that the problem? A few months ago when I started to use this software I remember being able to render videos faster than 1x the recorded speed, so it was like watching faster forward while rendering. Now, not so much. I could've been rendering to a faster drive before and forgot. I have an SSD, a Hitachi Deskstar and the Caviar Green.

[BrianCee]

Does no one have an answer for Edward

[SoNic67]

Limiting factor in your case is probably the HDD. "Green" drives take less power but they are slower. CPU has to wait for the files to be written and read. More RAM always help, because of the caching. There is no free lunch.
Open "Resource Monitor" and you will see.

As for the GPU "hardware acceleration" - I have the latest X7 and... is still not working for transcoding.
You can monitor the usage with GPU-Z.

[EdwardERS]

Limiting factor in your case is probably the HDD. "Green" drives take less power but they are slower. CPU has to wait for the files to be written and read. More RAM always help, because of the caching. There is no free lunch.
Open "Resource Monitor" and you will see.

I've found that using a faster hard drive will only increase video scrubbing speed. When going from the WD Green to my SSD, my projects render at the same speed. The preview project and when I scroll through it is what sees the big difference. I deal with giant lossless AVI files from Dxtory, it's too bad I don't have enough space on my SSD to do my work there routinely. My i5 CPU usage is pretty much 90%+ when rendering.

As for the GPU "hardware acceleration" - I have the latest X7 and... is still not working for transcoding.
You can monitor the usage with GPU-Z.

This is starting to bother me. Nvidia and AMD/ATI both supposedly offer hardware acceleration through either CUDA or OpenCL. Yes, in the editing preferences my acceleration options aren't greyed out, but whether they're enabled or not doesn't make any difference in how fast a video renders. Isn't that what hardware acceleration is supposed to do?

In Catalyst Control Center there's an accelerated video conversion setting under Video, but that doesn't seem to do anything.

I found some other threads discussing these things, but I can't find a definitive answer to "Can my AMD 6870 can accelerate video rendering and how to enable it through both the VS software and AMD software on my computer". I can check the boxes in VS edit settings, but nothing changes. It's like my video card software isn't configured correctly.

Video Studio Pro X6 - supported graphics card
http://forum.corel.com/EN/viewtopic.php?p=260354#p260354