One of my desktops is an older system - an Asus Tuf Z270 motherboard, I7-7700 processor, 16GB RAM and an NVidia GTX 750TI with 2 GB VRAM. V3 buss support. The 750TI is supplying a pair of 1920 x 1080 monitors at 60Hz. I am running the latest stable with the 6.1.26-1 kernel, Plasma 5.27.4 and the NVidia 530.41.03 driver.
I recently changed from mechanical to a pair of M2 drives, lots of difference in system performance. When streaming video the machine isnt as smooth as my newer laptop(Asus Vivobook). When streaming or doing other graphics intensive tasks(non gamer) I notice CPU utilization goes up pretty markedly and sometimes depending on what I am doing, the system gets laggy. How much difference would it make to upgrade to a newer video card with more VRAM? I assume with the present setup, the CPU is being “bothered” by having to help in servicing the monitors thus the higher usage.
Thanks
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The VRAM doesn’t mattter much. From your description, it’s simply your hardware is missing any required hardware acceleration (yes, they’re too old apart from for 1080p gaming). Thus, the CPU is tasked to do the hard work. I also recently just upgraded from 7th gen intel to Ryzen 6000, my old machine can’t even play 4K videos smoothly, it’s super choppy as indeed the CPU is used. Not anymore in my new machine, CPU usage is low as the hardware decoder is the one working.
I have a slightly older xfce laptop with with a 4th gen Intel proc and a comparable geforce 860m (-10% benchmark) feeding 2 monitors and I’ll run into similar issues when streaming hi-res content. Setting one monitor to a lower resolution like 1280x720 brings load down considerably.
Also, check which of the eye candy features in display settings you really need. On plasma in particular you can burn a lot of resources on transparencies, windows animations etc, hence the relatively large difference in ram and cpu use between a freshly installed kde minimal and a ‘fully customised plasma desktop’.
6 x 12
Thanks for the suggestions. When I recently changed from the spinning drive to an M2 I reinstalled Manjaro and imported most of the content from the spinning drive. I didnt import any config files. I run a pretty plain Plasma desktop without much eye candy. This installation is 3 days old, done with a fresh download of the os so there isnt much cruft there.
Note that vdpau is not used in chromium or Firefox as you see here: Hardware video acceleration - ArchWiki Only VAAPI is supported and that’s why it is utilizing video decoding only on the CPU. But most media players support it.
megavolt
thanks for this, will read more on it and may try it. Nano’ed Xorg.0.log and while it looked similar in some ways to many xorg.conf files I didnt see much of anything that reflects on what I am trying to do. Thanks for the pointer. When i ran grep -iE ‘vdpau | dri driver’ /var/log/Xorg.0.log the system didnt report anything back had to ctl+c to get back to the prompt. Looking int Firefox config now. I am amazed at how much I do not know.
Firefox media.ffmpeg. vaapi.enabled was set on false now true. About:support shows compositing on Web Render, also reflects the installed NVidia driver in various places so. Also finally figured out what I was dong wrong on grep so # grep -iE ‘vdpau | dri driver’ Xorg.0.log yields
[ 6.600] (II) NVIDIA(0): [DRI2] VDPAU driver: nvidia-- which solves another part of it. After the change in Firefox settings, still high CPU usage on some websites. Maybe time to build a more modern system and make this one a media server
Have not tried the vaapi driver for Firefox yet… I am somewhat limited by what I can do, system is busy shredding some spinning drives this afternoon. Many thanks for the kindness and interest. I should be able to get back on this tomorrow. What we are dealing with here is an area I am totally unfamiliar with…my ignorance is vast. Whats indicated by stat /dev/dri*
Thanks for this very much. I need to do some reading to understand more at the risk of becoming an appliance operator.There is just a hell of a lot I do not know.
Edit- question… VAAPI is designed to allow Firefox, VLC and other programs to use GPU hardware acceleration and from what I read is supported by AMD drivers… but given the VAAPI driver on Github for NVIdia systems, not natively supported by NVidia. I am assuming possibly incorrectly that lack of VAAPI support (among other things) is responsible for the higher CPU usage I see when I stream videos on youtube… given my monitors, the somewhat primitive standards (old) of my motherboard and 2GB of RAM on the video card. As leledumbo pointed out VRAM wouldnt make much difference so would a video card with more capabilities help aside from the VRAM or is the rest of the system unable to take advantage of a more advanced video card (I have been tempted by Intel’s Arc but after reading among other places Phoronics have held off…). Admittedly the 7700 based platform is pretty ancient by modern standards PCIEV3, slower RAM &c&c. I have lived with this system for 5 years without any hardware problems, I built it and will build the next one as well and it will be AMD I think. But I am trying to decide whether its worth it to put in a new video card or build new from the ground up. Many thanks to all of you. If my shredding will finish I may try the driver albeit given the caveat that it may not work with some apps…
Aside from photo editing on this system and some day trading, I am also an amateur radio operator contemplating purchase of Software Defined Radio–SDR equipment. From what I read about GnuRadio and other programs the processing load is heavy so this might not be the machine to try that on…
Again thanks to all of you.
You can still use, apparently, the latest nvidia driver … which does have the capabilities … just a little extra is required, such as that libva-nvidia-driver package, settings, and the augmented start command.
Which seems like a bit … but its not very different from everyone else who also need to set some options and change the startup to have hw-accel working.
Yes - nvidia was/is worse at it … particularly VAAPI, which is what the browsers use … but the above things should sort that out.
Similarly … VLC is pretty bad at its default/fall-back settings … so in order for it to work right you either need to make sure it runs entirely in software, or set up hw-accel correctly.
(see this thread as an example: DE froze with graphic glitches... lots of kernel, drm, and amdgpu entries in journal - #26 by cscs)
I prefer smplayer for a number of reasons … but this is another one … its better at falling back and most folks wont even notice an issue … but setting hw-accel works splendidly … and you can use VAAPI or VDPAU (which nvidia is much happier about).
Brief note to thank all of you for the interest and help. I think I am going to start investigating a new motherboard/GPU/RAM combination, this time AMD…rather than invest more $$ in an already old system. Again my thanks to all.