GPU Acceleration not working in 6.8 - 7.01

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skygrid
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu May 31, 2018 3:10 am

GPU Acceleration not working in 6.8 - 7.01

Post by skygrid »

Hi there,

I used to watch in FullHD with UMS on my PC and Kodi (latest) on FireTV. A few weeks ago I upgraded to a 4K UHD TV and now I want to watch corresponding Media in high quality :-)

But in UMS 6.8, 7 RC, 7.0 and 7.01 the 4K Movie needs to pause every 1-2 min. and takes some time to buffer. In 7.01 the Movie even looks blurry, as if I'm watching a SD up scaled Movie.
The new 4K FireTV with latest Kodi is connected via 10Gig wired Ethernet.

I've activated the "use GPU Acceleration" option within UMS, but a quick look in the Task manager (attached screenshot), shows that only the CPU is permanently at 100% load, while the GTX 980 TI is at max. 5% usage.

What can I do to really use the GPU and watch 4K media straight?

Your help is very much appreciated :-)

Kind regards,
Markus
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Nadahar
Posts: 1990
Joined: Tue Jun 09, 2015 5:57 pm

Re: GPU Acceleration not working in 6.8 - 7.01

Post by Nadahar »

This depends on FFmpeg, and the version that comes with UMS is relatively because some users have issues with subtitles not working with newer versions. You should try to rename the FFmpeg version that comes with UMS and use a recent version. You might also need to specify some custom FFmpeg parameters to enable NVidia hardware encoding, I'm not that into the details.

I've done some testing earlier with my GTX 970, and got it to work but only for certain h264 variants. The NVidia encoder has few or no options, so the output might not be compatible with what your renderer expects. Only testing it can reveal how well it works.

You should be aware that there are also hardware and license limitations: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-enco ... ort-matrix
I know I've seen the GeForce cards in this (or a similar) matrix before, but as it stands now it doesn't seem like any GeForce card has hardware encoding enabled. NVidia has a lot of crap going on with this, limiting the number of streams or blocking it completely in their drivers or firmware. Until they decide to stop all this crap and make it easy to determine what is supported for what card, there's no way for UMS to "autodetect" this that I can see.
Nadahar
Posts: 1990
Joined: Tue Jun 09, 2015 5:57 pm

Re: GPU Acceleration not working in 6.8 - 7.01

Post by Nadahar »

According to WikiPedia it is supported on 2. gen Maxwells, but there are some restrictions and x265 support is generally very limited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NV ... well_GM20x
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