Descrete GPU encoding not being used.

Hi,

I'm new here and fairly new to Resolve so I apologise if this is a stupid question.

I'm using Resolve (free) 18.1.4 on a laptop with an integrated Intel UHD 630 graphics card along side a discrete NVidia GTX 1650. When exporting from Resolve I don't think the NVidia cards NVEnc encoder is being used (the video encode graph in task manager is 0%).

Video profiles.png (45.15 KiB) Viewed 1762 times

I have read that GPU encoding was added in 17.4 to the free version and that there should be an option to select the NCEnv encoder in the output profile but the only options I see are 'auto' and 'native'.

Am I missing something obvious ? Should I be able to use the 1650's nvenc encoder and if so how ?

This is what my GPU settings looks like:

Video profiles.png (45.15 KiB) Viewed 1762 times

[Dwaine Maggart]

The 17.4 release note says this:

Hardware accelerated H.265 encodes on free version on Windows.

What that refers to is the native Windows encoder ability to do H.265 encoding using supported GPU hardware.

If you watch the Task Manager GPU performance graph while doing an H.265 QuickTime or MP4 render, you'll see the NVIDIA GPU being used in the Video Encode area.

Prior to 17.4, we did not use the native Windows encoder ability to use the GPU. It was limited to CPU processing.

All that said, for better encoding performance, we still recommend Resolve Studio.

Here is a performance comparison:

4K DNX -> 4K HEVC: (on RTX 3060)
Studio version using NvEnc: 47fps
Free version using Windows: 17fps

Thanks Dwaine.

So it was a misunderstanding on my part. It seems the hardware encoding on Resolve (Free) is only for H265, where I thought it was for both H264 and H265. Trying an export using H265 shows the GPU encoder being used in task manager.

Although you will see a boost in encoding speed of h265 on the free version, the bottleneck may be the cpu decoding of long GOP sources. The real speed increases will come from the Studio’s ability to hardware encode “and” hardware decode sources.

I don't quite understand. If Windows HEVC encoder also calls out to the gpu encoder (NVEnc) acceleration in the free version, is it deliberately slowed down vs. the Studio version? DNxHR in Dwaine's example is not long GOP so that's not why it's so much slower. H.265 encoder was never available in CPU with Resolve so the only way to have h.265 was hardware encoder.

Sent from my Mi 9T using Tapatalk

I believe the Microsoft HEVC (h265) encoder uses Media Foundation to make calls to the GPU for hardware encoding. This probably adds overhead to encoding speed. In the Studio version, the encoders are most likely created using the respective hardware’s SDKs.