I'm running VMix with 3 1080p inputs into a capture card. I also am running 3 monitors but want to run a 4th monitor so that other people in our studio can see the broadcast output.

I'm looking at a high end 3D graphics card (EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 06G-P4-4996-KR 6GB), but also looking at a high-end 2D graphics card (PNY NVIDIA NVS 510 Quad DisplayPort UHD 4K Graphics Card).

The 3D card costs twice as much, so I don't want to buy it unless I have to. Will the 2D card do the job? I also record the broadcast at 1080p to disk and broadcast 3 streams at once (1080, 720 and 480) so I need to be sure it will do the job.

Any advice is appreciated....thanks.

Greetings Icestream and/or others,

I found out that my existing card does allow for 4 outputs. But I'm having a real problem with rendering time.

A little background...

I'm runnning a Magewell XI400DE-HDMI 4 HDMI input capture card on an Asus X99 motherboard and I7-5820k CPU, 16GB RAM. The Magewell gets 3 inputs..1 from a camera, another from a laptop running powerpoint, and another from this PC.

For my live video broadcast I use 2 of the slots on my video card for the displays in front of me...which are for running Vmix, monitoring an IRC chat room, and tracking live connection statistics on a browser.
The 3rd output on my video card is sent directly into the Magewell capture card and into Vmix. I use it for running music videos off the PC during the broadcast.

I send the video out to the internet with 3 separate streams: 1080p (4.5Mbps), 720p (778kpbs) and 480p (350kbps). I also record the broadcast onto an SSD drive, h264 MP4 @8Mbps

Even with all of this, Vmix is running at less than 10ms render time. I use one of the fastest video cards, an asus GTX970 strix.

Here is the problem:

Once I learned that this card does allow for 4 monitors, I tried to use that 4th output to send a full screen of Vmix's video output (the same thing that goes to the media server) to a monitor in the broadcast building. But doing this causes my render time to shoot up to 30-50ms. I learned that this higher render time causes VMix to not record the broadcast properly...dropping frames.

Do I need to SLI a second video card? Would that help? Would a 2D card resolve the problem?

I'm not sure what to do...

Greetings Richard,

I appreciate your suggestions. I tried dropping one monitor and also reducing the size to 720p. Neither had a significant effect on the render time. As of now, I'm only running a 5ms render time, but when I click "fullscreen" to display the output on a separate monitor it jumps up to 35ms...even at 720p.

I'm willing to SLI the existing video card to help with the render time, but I'm wondering if that will help? Perhaps there is a bottleneck within vmix somewhere?

It is doing this without running any streams or recording. Just sitting there at a ready state, the render time jumps 10x when I hit "fullscreen."

Rather than use the fourth video card output for the distant monitor why no try to feed it via NDI? That implies that you have a computer at the far end running the Newtek Monitor app. I expect that would offload some of the work from your GPU.

I was wondering just how much hardware would be required to arrange a remote monitor driven via NDI. I had a cute little old embedded box called a FIT-PC2 on the shelf. It's a tiny little computer circa 2009 built for digital signage applications. Intel Atom Z530 at 1.6 GHz, GMA500 video with HDMI output, 1 GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet. It's basically a netbook.

I tossed an SSD in it and loaded Windows 7-32 bit. Once the OS & drivers were installed I loaded Newtek's NDI Monitor app and connected it to vMix over my LAN. The vMix project was set for 720p.

The hardware will drive a display at 1920x1080P60. However, the Atom isn't quite enough CPU to deliver full frame-rate. It seems to be delivering about 8-10 f/s depending upon the amount of motion in the video. The CPU is pegged at 100%, even with the video monitor app windowed. When pushed to full frame size the frame rate drops further.

An newer embedded PC with more CPU should be able to do a decent job driving a monitor this way.

Michael

I went ahead and purchased & installed another 970GTX and the render time was still above 30. I also learned that with SLI you can only have 2 screens.

I'm not sure the Avermedia device would be helpful. The bottleneck doesn't appear to be "recording to disk." The render time is still above 30 even without running a broadcast or doing any kind of recording.

EliYahu, I have an issue that might be related to your problems. A while ago some of my PCs (eg GTX 760, GTX860M) began to show stuttering video when Fullscren was on. Recently I noticed that the render time jumped from around 10 ms to around 40 ms when I turned Fullscreen on, and the stuttering began. I am still trying to figure out why.

One idea I have/had is that it has something to do with the use of FlipEx. The other day I found out that if I rolled back the Nvidia graphics driver the stuttering problem disappeared. Not sure which version, it was one from mid december 2015 (it will be a few days before I can check).

If you care/dare, try with an earlier graphics driver, and experiment with the FlipEx settings (Performance, check Advanced mode if v17).