Hi!

I started testing vMix after years of Wirecast use. I like the flexibility of Wirecast but It's licence update/upgrade is nowadays too pricy to out use and I have concerns about the high GPU usage that I saw in Wirecast 13 demo.

I help my local church on getting the services online since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak and we do not have resources to build a machine just for that, so, I use my personal PC and cameras to stream our services, I just got three capture cards from Avermedia (one old USB 1080p30 capable, one new USB 1080p60 capable and a internal PCIe 1080p60 too. My CPU is a Intel i7 8700k with 16gb RAM with a couple of SSDs and a AMD/ATI Radeon RX 5700XT 8Gb. I'm streaming in 1080p30 to YouTube and Facebook.

With Wirecast, I figured out that I can enable the i7 iGPU ands use Intel QuickSync Video to help lower the CPU usage, even having a non-supported GPU, the application can use the two GPUs, one to drive the monitor and accelerate all GUI/interface and the iGPU only to encode two streams: One to a re-stream service (YT/FB reflector) and one local file in case the internet go offline, I have a local back-up to upload after.

I configured everything in vMix and I know that my Radeon isn't supported to video encode, but I observed two things:

1- The FFMPEG that is installed with vMix is a lot old! Basically from 3-5 years ago, and newer version after 4.0 just support QSV and AMF video encoding, so, there is a way of update the embeded FFMPEG to a recent version and benefit from this sweet GPU power? To my isn't rocket science as is just a command line with a bunch of strings/parameters to talk with FFMPEG...

2- After set the local recording and the remote streaming, I checked the Taskmanager and the local recording encoding IS being done in my Radeon GPU, as the screenshots show. Is this a normal thing or is a "good" glitch?

Local file recording settings:
vMix recording settings.jpg (79kb) downloaded 4 time(s).

Streaming settings
vMix stream settings 1.jpg (28kb) downloaded 4 time(s).

Streaming CODEC settings
vMix stream settings 2.jpg (78kb) downloaded 8 time(s).

Task manager showing the Video encode on my AMD/ATI Radeon RX5700XT
vMix using Radeon 5700 to encode video for local file.png (1,770kb) downloaded 21 time(s).

The same task manager just after the local recoring was stopped showing the stop on "video encode" usage
Captura de Tela (10).png (2,692kb) downloaded 3 time(s).

Hi! Thanks for the reply :-)

I think that this isn't th case here, if you check the task manager on the screenshot, there is no activity on the Intel GPU, but, the AMD GPU shows the work in Video Encode Engine, so, my iGPU is totaly idle and in my case, no Intel QuickSync Video in action...

This is not good information. NDI is CPU intensive.

Further, you will see many, many recommendations for nVidia GPUs specifically because vMix can use the onboard dedicated silicon for H.264 encoding and decoding. These are known as NVENC and NVDEC.

Using NVENC significantly reduces CPU load related to encoding. nVidia recently changed the GPU driver to allow NVENC to support up to three separate streams on a GTX card, where in the past it was limited to two.

It's not clear to me that AMD GPUS have similar hardware units, or that vMix has such optimization for AMD GPUs. I would guess not, since they specifically recommend nVidia.

I guess it boils down to FFMPEG which vMix uses to encode videos.

If FFMPEG supports VCE which is found in AMD GPUs then probably vMix can also take advantage of VCE since the backend supports it.

Or I guess I was wrong, please correct me if I am so. Then again, I'll see my system does the same thing.

A simple answer to the original question.

Yes, It is.