I have a bit of what seems a unique setup.

My PC is a Dell OptiPlex 790 desktop tower with a Nvidia Quadro K4200 GPU card sitting inside. Running Windows 7 & 10 64bit (dual boot) on i3/8GB Ram/SSD.


There's alot of talk on the forums about the Nvidia GeForce cards (and even some AMD ones too) but what I haven't seen is any info about what kind of support one would receive from a Quadro card.

The K4200 GPU is a 3 year old card now, based on the Kepler chip (also seen in as low as the GTX 650). But it is still a decent card. 4GB Ram on board says alot. Spec requirements on vMix's website only point towards GeForce cards. But How much are the Quadro series really supported? In particular, what kind of performance should I expect from this model. Should I swap it out for a GeForce model instead? It does seem like the Quadro series is exactly what vMix should be designed upon - A benchmark product for professional video/CAD software.

Some of the issues I experience with this GPU in vMix...

When I enable the "hardware encoder" option in Stream settings, it takes a huge load off the CPU, as expected when streaming using GPU. But if enable that same feature under the MP4 recording option in Recording settings, the CPU is high when recording, noting to me that it's not utilising the GPU. But If I select FFMPEG in the Recording settings, and select the "MP4 NVENC" profile, I get minimal CPU usage. Any reason why this is?

Is vMix using raw GPU acceleration or just the NVENC chip in the card?

What does this mean for trying to use a AMD GPU instead?

These are the some of the questions that are bugging me.

I've also found what seems like a small bug in vMix, maybe likely nothing to do with the Quadro card in particular.
The Dell OptiPlex series (with the latest Bios) allows support for utilising BOTH the HD Graphics GPU embedded on Intel's CPU AND a discreet card AT THE SAME TIME. This means I can combine the 2 display outputs from the Motherboard with the 3 display outputs on the Quadro card, 4 on this card if I use a DisplayPort MST Hub. That potentially allows a total of 6 display outputs to be used simultaneously from this system. Plugging in a monitor into one of the Motherboard outputs before booting tells the Bios to enable both GPUs and both Windows 7 and 10 sees them and functions properly.

Everything in vMix seems to function optimally as it should when selecting the Nvidia card as the card to use.
The only issue I have, vMix doesn't allow desktop capture of any open application. If I select an application to capture, it displays black. It does however allow full-screen desktop capture. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but I'm guessing this setup is an area not visited by the devs as of yet. If I was to have the ability to capture applications in this setup, it would be absolutely perfect.

Any thoughts are welcome and thank you in advance for your help.

@ Vlman

First off, I am by no means technically savy in these matters, but these are my understandings in this debate (i.e. Quadro vs GeForce).
- vMix is designed to take advantage of "Gaming Technology" which GeForce cards and drivers are optimized for.
- Quadro cards are designed primarily for professional graphics applications (CAD, CGI, SFX and video editing) and hence, typically have more horsepower and features compared to their counterpart GeForce cousins for those applications, and so cost significantly more but are not necessarily optimized for gaming and often "underperform" compared to said cousins in games (although the lines are blurring in newer generation Quadro cards providing support for DirectX).
- Again, I am not familiar with the technological differences in the cards' architecture, but I suspect vMix is unlikely to take complete advantage of Quadro card capabilities at this time as the focus is more on "Gaming" technology and less on high end rendering and computational calculations.

If you have the need for the high end performance of a Quadro card for such professional graphic applications, then by all means, stick with the Quadro as you should be able to receive "decent" performance from recent generation cards in vMix, just not optimal. In general, on a cost/performance analysis, when it comes to vMix, Geforce is the way to go.

Just my thoughts.


Ice

It's quite depressing to read this. I just procured a HP Z240 unit that comes with a quadro k1200, and if I understand what you guys are saying correctly; I have to buy a new graphics card?

HP Z240 SFF

Is this inadequate to handle vmix? I don't have the unit here to run tests yet