GPU Tweak

[RickMen]

I know this might be left field but I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. I'm on a steep learning curve and I'm NOT a gamer. I just installed 'GPU Tweak III' and I'm trying to see if I can get more out of the graphic card (GT730) without upgrading. I have a few questions I'm hoping someone provide some insight:

a) Should I bother with trying to tweak my graphics card to create a custom profile for VS or should I just leave it to the default settings? What have others done?

b) If yes above, what settings should I tweak? Does anyone have a recommended profile they use and can share? Is there another thread/resource you can point me to?

There's allot of GPU tweaking advice for gaming but not for video editing.

[asik1]

As with all tweaks unless you try you wont know.
As VS can be very unstable at times, any unreliable hardware wont help .
It's all down to your type of work and resolutions.

[RickMen]

I will experiment. I hear you about the 'unreliable' aspect, will tread cautiously.

asik1, do you tweak your GPU for VS?

[Ken Berry]

Rick -- a question back at you. I see you have a Gigabyte B660M motherboard. I guess that you are aware it has decent on-board graphics in addition to your added GeForce GT730 card. But with VS, have you set the NVidia as the GPU to use? If not, you may be using the on-board Intel graphics without knowing it... I'm not sure in any case how far you can tweak on-board graphics.

FWIW, in case you ask, I have not tweaked my own AMD Ryzen 6600XT graphics in any way, mainly because I don't think I need to. My motherboard, by the way, does not have on-board graphics.

[RickMen]

Ken, I have the intel i7-12700F variant which means that it has no on-board graphics (I've learnt my lesson the hard way). I have set VS to use the only GPU option available to me ie the discrete graphics card. When last upgrading my Desktop I didn't give too much thought to the GPU side of the equation, I wish I had. Although the current market/prices/availability for GPUs seems to indicate that I might not have had much of a choice given my budget constraints.

[asik1]

Rick, what are you after with the tweaks?
Do you think that if you overclocked your GPU by 30%, VS will render 30% faster?
The simple answer is probably not.

[RickMen]

asik1, Using Task Manager as my guide I have noticed that when the rendering is passed to the GPU (when it comes to say the split screen part of the timeline) its usage only spikes to around 30-60% (from say <5%) while the CPU usage drops down to 10-20% range (from memory), then when the render passes back to the CPU (which then spikes back to 50%-95% usage range) the GPU usage drops back down to 0-5%.

My thinking is if I can boost GPU performance then that should show up in quicker render times for those parts of the Project which are handled by the GPU (split screens etc). However if that's not the case then I'll save myself the hassle. I not expecting a 30% faster render if I overclock my GPU by 30%, but I would expect a 30% faster render for those parts of the project handled by the GPU. Is that not the case? (Too linear? Haven't considered other factors?)

[Ken Berry]

Can we assume that you have hardware acceleration selected when you render? Mind you, I noted that you say you set VS to use your NVidia card -- was that in Preferences > Performance?

I have to say I still wonder about that one. It used to refer to CUDA which of course relates to NVidia. But there was a problem in that VS, even in its most recent versions (and probably including VS 2022) used an old version of CUDA which didn't fully work with much more modern NVidia graphics cards. So people using that hardware acceleration never got much joy out of it. Hopefully someone with such a card will make a liar out of me...or show that a much more recent version of CUDA is used. But, according to my thinking at the moment, how you could tweak the graphics to provide more resources in the stages you mention, escapes me if what VS is providing it is not really up to the job.

[RickMen]

Ken, You assume correctly ie Preferences > Performance = NVIDIA CUDA.

Thanks for the background information, I'll re-assess how much effort I put into this going forward.

[Davidk]

As a tutor in VS, I used to be asked (often) what is the best PC for editing? As a general rule, PC and computer hardware places know about gaming, and less than nothing about video editing. But in both cases it's all about the imagery, ie visuals, with text and voice coming a distant last.
So a good gaming machine will do editing well. How good is good? it depends as always on what you can afford: different parts of the hardware have different effects. Always, a good fast cpu is a must, at least 3ghz and desirably 4Ghz, both of which speak to the motherboard you use. A multi core cpu of at least 4, but beyond that, the software really does not use it (it's a programming thing; no idea why but this seems to be a common end result) and the extra cores just cost more. Lot's of RAM: editors will work with 4gb, sort of, but 8gb is really a minimum, and 16 Gb is better. 32gb would be even better still. An SSD as your main C/boot drive, as it is basically all electronic, no hardware latency to manage. Which is important because in any editing/gaming session, the task control is continually switching between OS services and the application and no latency means it all works faster. Extra fast interface sata-HDD directly connected to the motherboard to store the editor/gaming data

If you use external removable drives for either gaming or editing make sure they are at least usb3/usb C and that you have enough external connectors of that type available on the motherboard. (this is worth a note because most essential peripherals - mouse, printer, keyboard, wifi node etc - these days are usb connected, so the number of available usb connectors can be an unusual constraint) you might be able to get by with everything "wifi'd" but note that wifi is a single, shared connection.

Most motherboards have internal graphics that are good enough, but an add-in graphics card enables the PC to offload graphics processing to that adapter and thus overall speeds things up, provided the editor or games software is compatible: some (brand and version) isn't. Do your research if going down this route. There are a range of good cards available, but note that most of these cards use the same amount of power that the parent PC/motherboard uses, so the power supply available has to be able to cope. It's not uncommon for the PC power supply need to be double when a graphics adapter is installed, and there is more cost there. Ensure the PC housing/tower is ventilated sufficiently for the extra power being dissipated within it - more fans.

[RickMen]

Thanks Davidk for your input. The only point I'd like to make is that in my experience my CPU (12 cores) can on occasions briefly spike to 90-95% usage when rendering (and make allot of noise) so I assume all the cores are in action.

[RickMen]

I had recently benchmarked my PC using Userbenchmark.com and everything (except for the GPU) came back with a respectable score, the GPU was the only outlier. I had already implemented allot of what Davidk had recommended. So hence my attention turn to how to get more out of my GPU.

[asik1]

Rick, we hope you will come back ad report your findings.
With what type of video you rendered and how overclocking your gpu helped.

[morrisben]

As a tutor in VS, I used to be asked (often) what is the best PC for editing? As a general rule, PC and computer hardware places know about gaming, and less than nothing about video editing. But in both cases it's all about the imagery, ie visuals, with text and voice coming a distant last.
So a good gaming machine will do editing well. How good is good? it depends as always on what you can afford: different parts of the hardware have different effects. Always, a good fast cpu is a must, at least 3ghz and desirably 4Ghz, both of which speak to the motherboard you use. A multi core cpu of at least 4, but beyond that, the software really does not use it (it's a programming thing; no idea why but this seems to be a common end result) and the extra cores just cost more. Lot's of RAM: editors will work with 4gb, sort of, but 8gb is really a minimum, and 16 Gb is better. 32gb would be even better still. An SSD as your main C/boot drive, as it is basically all electronic, no hardware latency to manage. Which is important because in any editing/gaming session, the task control is continually switching between OS services and the application and no latency means it all works faster. Extra fast interface sata-HDD directly connected to the motherboard to store the editor/gaming data

If you use external removable drives for either gaming or editing make sure they are at least usb3/usb C and that you have enough external connectors of that type available on the motherboard. (this is worth a note because most essential peripherals - mouse, printer, keyboard, wifi node etc - these days are usb connected, so the number of available usb connectors can be an unusual constraint) you might be able to get by with everything "wifi'd" but note that wifi is a single, shared connection.

Most motherboards have internal graphics that are good enough, but an add-in graphics card enables the PC to offload graphics processing to that adapter and thus overall speeds things up, provided the editor or games software is compatible: some (brand and version) isn't. Do your research if going down this route. There are a range of good cards available, but note that most of these cards use the same amount of power that the parent PC/motherboard uses, so the power supply available has to be able to cope. It's not uncommon for the PC power supply need to be double when a graphics adapter is installed, and there is more cost there. Ensure the PC housing/tower is ventilated sufficiently for the extra power being dissipated within it - more fans.

I want to improve the performance of my VS software. If I add graphic card how much the software will use it and improve proccesing time? Is corel VS realy make use of the GPU hardware?

[Davidk]

To the outstanding comment about an editor using all the cores of a cpu - only sometimes. More often than not, just the one core. the essence of this is multi-threading, whereby different app threads use different cores. A video editor usually doesn't multi-thread: getting the timing/sequence right is an essential, and different threads/cores may terminate a function call early or late and be out of sequence: there's some special programming skills to get this right. Gamers seem to invest, video editors less so. More often, it's an app per core: the OS in one core, another app like AV in another, a 3rd app in another if available and so on, and that's really a function of the OS. A single app spreading over several cores is a rarity.

As to an editor using the capabilities of a plug-in video adapter, it varies. The adapters have cpu's and memory, and to use them the app has to use the relevant driver to pass tasks and data to the adapter, and get the processed results back. For a long time, video studio claimed this feature but mostly it did not work: relied on a old CUDA interface which rarely worked. About 3 versions ago Corel made a distinct effort to improve this, and it shows in the preference performance options choices. Having an Intel processor has a side benefit in this space; every cpu produced since 2011 has an on-chip video cpu - basically an extra like a separate adapter card has - which is usable via drivers. Generally, this sort of video adapter "help" really shows when doing a repetitive, time consuming task, like rendering, esp with some of the UHD compressed formats. In that sort of task, 20-30% faster has been reported. Otherwise in general editing any benefits may not be evident.

There have been a number of topic posts over the years on both these subjects (the benefits of multiple cores and plug-in adapters) that can be searched.