Proxy generator much faster on M1 than Windows 11

Hello,

I am just in the middle of generating proxies for a quite big project with over 1300 video clips.
I use my Windows 11 machine with AMD Ryzen 9 3600 12 cores 64gb RAM, RTX4060 TI 16GB and get around 20-30fps. Simultaneously i rund Proxy generator on the tiny Apple macbook Air M1 8GB and get 80-95fps.
It's H264 8 bit 4:2:0.

What's up with that? Even with my previous GTX 1070 i could easily reach 120fps or more out of Resolve.

The media files are on a NAS, so that I can encode from both machines.

There are virtually no settings I can find for Proxy Generator. Is there anything I could try?

Regards

Next issue:
Occasionally Proxy generator just crashes silently on Windows...
no error message, no nothing. Boom and it's gone.

Are your read/writes to that NAS the same as the MacBook? Perhaps the connection is bottlenecked.

Yes and no. I have many different types of footage. From iPhone to Panasonic EVA1 and Red etc.
So when proxy generator works on the big file formats, i can see that the 1Gbps Network is reaching its limit.

But I also tried with only one computer running it.

I also tried to create files with Shutterencoder. It was 2-5 times faster than blackmagic proxy generator..
When the blackmagic proxy generator runs, I can see that the GPU has a big load on "3D". not sure what's happening here. Video encode and decode are around 20%, but 3D load can get up to 90%. I think it does many things in the background and in fact it's half of davinci resolve loaded when proxy generator runs...

Hopefully they improve the performance in the future..

One thing I've run into with other applications in Windows, like VMix, is that they let the OS choose with GPU they use. To correct that you have to use the nVidia control panel, go to 3D settings, and choose which GPU each listed application is assigned to.

Right now it sounds like your proxy generator is defaulted to the integral GPU on the processor instead of your nVidia GPU, and is therefore using software video encoding hardware. That is my guess for what the 3D load indicates.

The point is that all Macs with Apple silicon have hardware encoding to H.264/265 and even ProRes.
Not all PCs have these. There are folks who have a beefy PC and a cheap Mac mini next to it for encoding proxies only.
BTW, since ProRes is such an easy format to decode, it's a good idea to use it for proxies. PCs can read it, they just don't write it (under DR).

There are also a lot of variables in the x86 world, and support for hardware encoding on AMD GPUs is lagging... but also, the number of configurations means that some software just doesn't use the hardware available.

Like the Magic Mask... it's fast in the color page, and painfully slow in the Fusion page because Fusion is very bad at using GPU resources.