I am using an old GTX 970, with 8 cameras a mixture of 4M and 8M (one 2M doorbell) and all running at a fairly low frame rate (4fps) on a fairly fast but old I7-6770K system, CPU in steady state is around 8%, GPU usage negligible since writing direct to disk.
When scrubbing against the timeline it is modestly slow, but neither CPU nor GPU are high (disk might be).
I am doing a new build so I can upgrade to W11. New disks will be about the same speed, maybe a bit faster but still HDD/Sata speed. I think they are the limiting factor during scrubbing. I may migrate the prior few days to M.2 to mitigate that.
I was going to reuse the GPU since it doesn't show busy.
But... can the GPU be a limiting factor, e.g. old and slower PCI for example, without showing busy in task manager? Will task manager always show a high busy percentage if it is the limiting factor? Or are there other places I should look?
I hate to spend $1000 on a new GPU if it's not holding me back.
Is my GPU a limiting factor?
Re: Is my GPU a limiting factor?
Not enough information. But in my experience BI does not need a GPU, but the correct setup from the camera to BI is important. The CPU is important and I would go for and have i7-14700 for 65w and 28 cores and Igpu. Keep your old GPU and if need be put half of the cameras on it and half on the Igpu. I personally have not used Igpu with BI but it should work. Why are you changing the HD's, use them and replace as needed. Do not use SSD or NVME on a video recorder for anything other than the OS.
Re: Is my GPU a limiting factor?
So I've built the new system and have some feedback. It has a Intel Core Ultra 7 265K 3.9 processor on a Z890 MB, and I stuck an older GTX970 in there. It has two Samsung 990 Pro drives for system and "new" video, and a mirrored pair of 18TB WDC Purple drives for longer term storage.
It just flies. Scrubbing video is now practically instant, which is a significant improvement over what I had before, and I think was disk speed limited (I didn't use SSD for video on the old system).
What was surprising was that the Windows 11 task manager showed zero, absolutely zero, GPU usage. I got out a sensor program (HWINFO64) and watched, and there it showed the GPU used between about 10-50%.
I think that I was completely disk limited on the old system. The new system is a LOT more responsive, and the old system showed near 100% disk activity while doing things like scrubbing. Neither system showed anywhere near 100% GPU usage, though I'm really confused by W11 showing zero (it shows the GPU, just not any usage).
Very happy with the new server though. It also runs PLEX, and will be a NAS server for me. It's a bit over-powered I think for all this, but it's very nice for BI. I had never really been happy with scrubbing with BI; it worked, but it was slow and jerky. Now it's very nice and fast, and I think it's the SSD (NVMe) that makes the difference. I'm dedicating 1TB to new video, and then it will move to the slow purple drives.
My question really related to the difficultly on windows systems telling where your bottlenecks are. Consider CPU. I have an image processing program which can be completely CPU bound on some activities, but it's single streamed. My desktop has 64 virtual cores, so when this program is completely CPU bound it shows about 2% busy. Someone looking at task manager has no idea why it is going slowly. Similar things can happen with GPU requests.
But after changing over, I'm fairly sure GPU was a non-issue, even this old one, and it was all disk speed.
It just flies. Scrubbing video is now practically instant, which is a significant improvement over what I had before, and I think was disk speed limited (I didn't use SSD for video on the old system).
What was surprising was that the Windows 11 task manager showed zero, absolutely zero, GPU usage. I got out a sensor program (HWINFO64) and watched, and there it showed the GPU used between about 10-50%.
I think that I was completely disk limited on the old system. The new system is a LOT more responsive, and the old system showed near 100% disk activity while doing things like scrubbing. Neither system showed anywhere near 100% GPU usage, though I'm really confused by W11 showing zero (it shows the GPU, just not any usage).
Very happy with the new server though. It also runs PLEX, and will be a NAS server for me. It's a bit over-powered I think for all this, but it's very nice for BI. I had never really been happy with scrubbing with BI; it worked, but it was slow and jerky. Now it's very nice and fast, and I think it's the SSD (NVMe) that makes the difference. I'm dedicating 1TB to new video, and then it will move to the slow purple drives.
My question really related to the difficultly on windows systems telling where your bottlenecks are. Consider CPU. I have an image processing program which can be completely CPU bound on some activities, but it's single streamed. My desktop has 64 virtual cores, so when this program is completely CPU bound it shows about 2% busy. Someone looking at task manager has no idea why it is going slowly. Similar things can happen with GPU requests.
But after changing over, I'm fairly sure GPU was a non-issue, even this old one, and it was all disk speed.