Graphics

Hi everyone,

I would like to understand how the choice of the GPU/graphics card is influencing the performance of XPression software. I have built a quite powerful machine in terms of CPU, RAM, diskspeed, pcie bandwidth. It made a great leap regarding the former 10 year old HP Z800 machine. But when I put my old GTX 970 into that machine, I can hardly sense an improvement on how XPression itself is performing (ok, its still 32 bit software so RAM is not used beyond 4GB) away from the overall better Windows performance. I do assume that the Framebuffer is not cruicial, is it? I would expect that the FB is delivered always ONE HD stream for one output as a result of the renderings before - regardless how many streams are combined in one image before output, right?

So can anyone tell me what the main bottleneck is for example in the number of simultaniously played full HD streams? The old machine would begin to drop frames here and there when I would play say 3 full HD streams in parallel. I was expecting a proportional scaling when I have 4 times the pcie bandwidth an more than 20 times the diskspeed. So I assume that the bottleneck seems to be the graphics card. Am I right?

But what properties of the graphics card are most crucial for XPression performance? Is it

- the gpu core count 
- the gpu core clock
- the dedicated graphics memory size
- the memory bandwidth

I could just buy a RTX 3090 for about 3000 € and see what happens ... but still I would not know if the amount of RAM, the core count, the core clock, the memory bandwidth would be the reason for a performance boost. I would never know if a GTX 3060 (around 500 €) for example would have been sufficiant or not (and vice versa, if the performance would not be boosted with a 3060).

So: what can I expect to take the highest impact on video playpack performance?

I would like to avoid spending 3000€ in vain, when it would not outperform the 500 € GPU. I mean it is not about gaming with dozens of powerful rendering tricks like GPU raytracing etc. because XPression does not take advantage of those modern high end features, does it? In my understanding XPression playpack performance is about sheer throughput bandwidth, right?

For example if you compare the GTX 3060 with 12GB but only 192 Bit memory bandwidth and less cores against a GTX 3060 ti with 8GB but with a 256 bit memory bandwith and more cores... what would improve the playback prrformance?
Apart from the fact, that we do not utilize many 3D Objects in our designs... As far as I know XPression does not provide a sophisticated usage of lightning, does not use reflection, refraction, fog, raytracing, scene/depth based blur or other things  It is straight foreward 3D with some basic lightning - period. Right?

I would appreciate any "light" in this for me "shady topic" of GPU capabilities and its dependancy on XPression performance.

If all my above thoughts are crap, please let me know. I also don't quite understand the many "memory allocation" settings on the XPression prefs (I did not touch them so far).
And if someone could share his/her expierience with a 64 bit edition of XPression (and what difference it makes) this would be very interesting too.

Thanks in advance

------------------------------
Sefa Aydemir
On Air Visuals / Switchers and Live Graphics Specialist
MMC Studios Cologne
Cologne Germany
------------------------------

Most of the rendering is done on the GPU so changing that is the most important component for XPression, the 970 is a 7-year-old card so even changing to something like a 1080ti would be a marked improvement in performance. In our XPression machines, we ship using the P4000 however the GTX gaming cards work very well if you can get one at a reasonable price. XPression is available in 64bit as well, you just need the installer. I recommend contacting our tech support if you'd like the 64bit version.

------------------------------
Simon Redmile
Test Pilot | Senior Graphic Programmer & Designer
Ross Video
London United Kingdom
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-07-2021 04:39
From: Sefa Aydemir
Subject: GPU choice & its impact on XPression performance

Hi everyone,

I would like to understand how the choice of the GPU/graphics card is influencing the performance of XPression software. I have built a quite powerful machine in terms of CPU, RAM, diskspeed, pcie bandwidth. It made a great leap regarding the former 10 year old HP Z800 machine. But when I put my old GTX 970 into that machine, I can hardly sense an improvement on how XPression itself is performing (ok, its still 32 bit software so RAM is not used beyond 4GB) away from the overall better Windows performance. I do assume that the Framebuffer is not cruicial, is it? I would expect that the FB is delivered always ONE HD stream for one output as a result of the renderings before - regardless how many streams are combined in one image before output, right?

So can anyone tell me what the main bottleneck is for example in the number of simultaniously played full HD streams? The old machine would begin to drop frames here and there when I would play say 3 full HD streams in parallel. I was expecting a proportional scaling when I have 4 times the pcie bandwidth an more than 20 times the diskspeed. So I assume that the bottleneck seems to be the graphics card. Am I right?

But what properties of the graphics card are most crucial for XPression performance? Is it

- the gpu core count 
- the gpu core clock
- the dedicated graphics memory size
- the memory bandwidth

I could just buy a RTX 3090 for about 3000 € and see what happens ... but still I would not know if the amount of RAM, the core count, the core clock, the memory bandwidth would be the reason for a performance boost. I would never know if a GTX 3060 (around 500 €) for example would have been sufficiant or not (and vice versa, if the performance would not be boosted with a 3060).

So: what can I expect to take the highest impact on video playpack performance?

I would like to avoid spending 3000€ in vain, when it would not outperform the 500 € GPU. I mean it is not about gaming with dozens of powerful rendering tricks like GPU raytracing etc. because XPression does not take advantage of those modern high end features, does it? In my understanding XPression playpack performance is about sheer throughput bandwidth, right?

For example if you compare the GTX 3060 with 12GB but only 192 Bit memory bandwidth and less cores against a GTX 3060 ti with 8GB but with a 256 bit memory bandwith and more cores... what would improve the playback prrformance?
Apart from the fact, that we do not utilize many 3D Objects in our designs... As far as I know XPression does not provide a sophisticated usage of lightning, does not use reflection, refraction, fog, raytracing, scene/depth based blur or other things  It is straight foreward 3D with some basic lightning - period. Right?

I would appreciate any "light" in this for me "shady topic" of GPU capabilities and its dependancy on XPression performance.

If all my above thoughts are crap, please let me know. I also don't quite understand the many "memory allocation" settings on the XPression prefs (I did not touch them so far).
And if someone could share his/her expierience with a 64 bit edition of XPression (and what difference it makes) this would be very interesting too.

Thanks in advance

------------------------------
Sefa Aydemir
On Air Visuals / Switchers and Live Graphics Specialist
MMC Studios Cologne
Cologne Germany
------------------------------

Hi Simon,

thanx for your qick reply!

I am aware that most of the renderng is taking place in the GPU, but as tried to expain, we don't use designs that utilize complex or many 3D objects. Most of the designs use a fistful of quads. The polygon count is redicoulous for a strong and even for a "weak" 7 year old GPU. That is why I was asking for some deeper understanding WHAT part of the graphics card is responsible (if any!) for the maximum parallel number of full HD streams that my system can handle.

It is kind of a question like "I want to transport as many card boxes as I can with my new truck. So what kind of truck truck would you recommend? One with the extreme horsepower or the other one with the biggest loading volume?"
It leaves me kind of clueless if the advise is "If you buy a new truck, it would be better than your old one. Our trucks are Mercedes trucks." :-) No offends!

I mean, which gear in the system will push the number of HD streams to the max? There must be a difference between a card with big memory and slow/less CUDA cores compared to a card with less memory but faster/more CUDA cores for example.

Could you (or any other community user) provide some more detailed information? That would be great. Thank you :-)

With best regards
Sefa

------------------------------
Sefa Aydemir
On Air Visuals / Switchers and Live Graphics Specialist
MMC Studios Cologne
Cologne Germany
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-07-2021 06:26
From: Simon Redmile
Subject: GPU choice & its impact on XPression performance

Most of the rendering is done on the GPU so changing that is the most important component for XPression, the 970 is a 7-year-old card so even changing to something like a 1080ti would be a marked improvement in performance. In our XPression machines, we ship using the P4000 however the GTX gaming cards work very well if you can get one at a reasonable price. XPression is available in 64bit as well, you just need the installer. I recommend contacting our tech support if you'd like the 64bit version.

------------------------------
Simon Redmile
Test Pilot | Senior Graphic Programmer & Designer
Ross Video
London United Kingdom

Original Message:
Sent: 10-07-2021 04:39
From: Sefa Aydemir
Subject: GPU choice & its impact on XPression performance

Hi everyone,

I would like to understand how the choice of the GPU/graphics card is influencing the performance of XPression software. I have built a quite powerful machine in terms of CPU, RAM, diskspeed, pcie bandwidth. It made a great leap regarding the former 10 year old HP Z800 machine. But when I put my old GTX 970 into that machine, I can hardly sense an improvement on how XPression itself is performing (ok, its still 32 bit software so RAM is not used beyond 4GB) away from the overall better Windows performance. I do assume that the Framebuffer is not cruicial, is it? I would expect that the FB is delivered always ONE HD stream for one output as a result of the renderings before - regardless how many streams are combined in one image before output, right?

So can anyone tell me what the main bottleneck is for example in the number of simultaniously played full HD streams? The old machine would begin to drop frames here and there when I would play say 3 full HD streams in parallel. I was expecting a proportional scaling when I have 4 times the pcie bandwidth an more than 20 times the diskspeed. So I assume that the bottleneck seems to be the graphics card. Am I right?

But what properties of the graphics card are most crucial for XPression performance? Is it

- the gpu core count 
- the gpu core clock
- the dedicated graphics memory size
- the memory bandwidth

I could just buy a RTX 3090 for about 3000 € and see what happens ... but still I would not know if the amount of RAM, the core count, the core clock, the memory bandwidth would be the reason for a performance boost. I would never know if a GTX 3060 (around 500 €) for example would have been sufficiant or not (and vice versa, if the performance would not be boosted with a 3060).

So: what can I expect to take the highest impact on video playpack performance?

I would like to avoid spending 3000€ in vain, when it would not outperform the 500 € GPU. I mean it is not about gaming with dozens of powerful rendering tricks like GPU raytracing etc. because XPression does not take advantage of those modern high end features, does it? In my understanding XPression playpack performance is about sheer throughput bandwidth, right?

For example if you compare the GTX 3060 with 12GB but only 192 Bit memory bandwidth and less cores against a GTX 3060 ti with 8GB but with a 256 bit memory bandwith and more cores... what would improve the playback prrformance?
Apart from the fact, that we do not utilize many 3D Objects in our designs... As far as I know XPression does not provide a sophisticated usage of lightning, does not use reflection, refraction, fog, raytracing, scene/depth based blur or other things  It is straight foreward 3D with some basic lightning - period. Right?

I would appreciate any "light" in this for me "shady topic" of GPU capabilities and its dependancy on XPression performance.

If all my above thoughts are crap, please let me know. I also don't quite understand the many "memory allocation" settings on the XPression prefs (I did not touch them so far).
And if someone could share his/her expierience with a 64 bit edition of XPression (and what difference it makes) this would be very interesting too.

Thanks in advance

------------------------------
Sefa Aydemir
On Air Visuals / Switchers and Live Graphics Specialist
MMC Studios Cologne
Cologne Germany
------------------------------

What issues are you facing? Are you losing real-time or do you just see the performance is high? Is it going over 100%?

Are you using a lot of videos on air at the same time or have you got heavy textures on them? Are your textures made in sizes to the power of 2? There are many factors that will make a scene heavy beyond simply polygon count.

------------------------------
Simon Redmile
Test Pilot | Senior Graphic Programmer & Designer
Ross Video
London United Kingdom
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-07-2021 10:47
From: Sefa Aydemir
Subject: GPU choice & its impact on XPression performance

Hi Simon,

thanx for your qick reply!

I am aware that most of the renderng is taking place in the GPU, but as tried to expain, we don't use designs that utilize complex or many 3D objects. Most of the designs use a fistful of quads. The polygon count is redicoulous for a strong and even for a "weak" 7 year old GPU. That is why I was asking for some deeper understanding WHAT part of the graphics card is responsible (if any!) for the maximum parallel number of full HD streams that my system can handle.

It is kind of a question like "I want to transport as many card boxes as I can with my new truck. So what kind of truck truck would you recommend? One with the extreme horsepower or the other one with the biggest loading volume?"
It leaves me kind of clueless if the advise is "If you buy a new truck, it would be better than your old one. Our trucks are Mercedes trucks." :-) No offends!

I mean, which gear in the system will push the number of HD streams to the max? There must be a difference between a card with big memory and slow/less CUDA cores compared to a card with less memory but faster/more CUDA cores for example.

Could you (or any other community user) provide some more detailed information? That would be great. Thank you :-)

With best regards
Sefa

------------------------------
Sefa Aydemir
On Air Visuals / Switchers and Live Graphics Specialist
MMC Studios Cologne
Cologne Germany

Original Message:
Sent: 10-07-2021 06:26
From: Simon Redmile
Subject: GPU choice & its impact on XPression performance

Most of the rendering is done on the GPU so changing that is the most important component for XPression, the 970 is a 7-year-old card so even changing to something like a 1080ti would be a marked improvement in performance. In our XPression machines, we ship using the P4000 however the GTX gaming cards work very well if you can get one at a reasonable price. XPression is available in 64bit as well, you just need the installer. I recommend contacting our tech support if you'd like the 64bit version.

------------------------------
Simon Redmile
Test Pilot | Senior Graphic Programmer & Designer
Ross Video
London United Kingdom

Original Message:
Sent: 10-07-2021 04:39
From: Sefa Aydemir
Subject: GPU choice & its impact on XPression performance

Hi everyone,

I would like to understand how the choice of the GPU/graphics card is influencing the performance of XPression software. I have built a quite powerful machine in terms of CPU, RAM, diskspeed, pcie bandwidth. It made a great leap regarding the former 10 year old HP Z800 machine. But when I put my old GTX 970 into that machine, I can hardly sense an improvement on how XPression itself is performing (ok, its still 32 bit software so RAM is not used beyond 4GB) away from the overall better Windows performance. I do assume that the Framebuffer is not cruicial, is it? I would expect that the FB is delivered always ONE HD stream for one output as a result of the renderings before - regardless how many streams are combined in one image before output, right?

So can anyone tell me what the main bottleneck is for example in the number of simultaniously played full HD streams? The old machine would begin to drop frames here and there when I would play say 3 full HD streams in parallel. I was expecting a proportional scaling when I have 4 times the pcie bandwidth an more than 20 times the diskspeed. So I assume that the bottleneck seems to be the graphics card. Am I right?

But what properties of the graphics card are most crucial for XPression performance? Is it

- the gpu core count 
- the gpu core clock
- the dedicated graphics memory size
- the memory bandwidth

I could just buy a RTX 3090 for about 3000 € and see what happens ... but still I would not know if the amount of RAM, the core count, the core clock, the memory bandwidth would be the reason for a performance boost. I would never know if a GTX 3060 (around 500 €) for example would have been sufficiant or not (and vice versa, if the performance would not be boosted with a 3060).

So: what can I expect to take the highest impact on video playpack performance?

I would like to avoid spending 3000€ in vain, when it would not outperform the 500 € GPU. I mean it is not about gaming with dozens of powerful rendering tricks like GPU raytracing etc. because XPression does not take advantage of those modern high end features, does it? In my understanding XPression playpack performance is about sheer throughput bandwidth, right?

For example if you compare the GTX 3060 with 12GB but only 192 Bit memory bandwidth and less cores against a GTX 3060 ti with 8GB but with a 256 bit memory bandwith and more cores... what would improve the playback prrformance?
Apart from the fact, that we do not utilize many 3D Objects in our designs... As far as I know XPression does not provide a sophisticated usage of lightning, does not use reflection, refraction, fog, raytracing, scene/depth based blur or other things  It is straight foreward 3D with some basic lightning - period. Right?

I would appreciate any "light" in this for me "shady topic" of GPU capabilities and its dependancy on XPression performance.

If all my above thoughts are crap, please let me know. I also don't quite understand the many "memory allocation" settings on the XPression prefs (I did not touch them so far).
And if someone could share his/her expierience with a 64 bit edition of XPression (and what difference it makes) this would be very interesting too.

Thanks in advance

------------------------------
Sefa Aydemir
On Air Visuals / Switchers and Live Graphics Specialist
MMC Studios Cologne
Cologne Germany
------------------------------

There are a lot more important factors to performance than GPU selection.  Output framebuffer card can make a big difference.  Best performance can be achieved with Matrox as we can do all the RGB to YUV colorspace conversion on the GPU and send the matrox board YCbCr data rather than RGBA data; so the amount of data transmitted is significantly less.  (This is also heavily dependent on versions of XPression as newer versions had even more optimizations like that).  Using older XPression software is not going to perform as well as current versions.

Video Clip playback is not very dependent on GPU, so if playing multiple full-HD clips simultaneously is your goal then CPU selection has a much bigger impact on performance.  6 or 8 core CPUs at 3.5+ GHZ are better for this task than 20 core CPUS at 2.2 Ghz for example.  You should open the video cache monitor in the debug menu to see if video clip decoding is an issue in your scenes.

If you're asking which specific specs on a GPU would make the most difference to XPression, it would be Core/Memory clock speeds and overall memory bandwidth.  XPression does not use CUDA so # of cuda cores would be irrelevant.  A GPU was 6GB of memory and higher memory bandwidth would perform much better than a GPU with 20GB and slower bandwidth/clock speeds.   But, if you are having performance issues with a modern GPU (GTX1080 or higher) I would suggest that the GPU is not the likely source of your performance issues.





​

------------------------------
Brian Ford
Ross Video
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-08-2021 07:27
From: Simon Redmile
Subject: GPU choice & its impact on XPression performance

What issues are you facing? Are you losing real-time or do you just see the performance is high? Is it going over 100%?

Are you using a lot of videos on air at the same time or have you got heavy textures on them? Are your textures made in sizes to the power of 2? There are many factors that will make a scene heavy beyond simply polygon count.

------------------------------
Simon Redmile
Test Pilot | Senior Graphic Programmer & Designer
Ross Video
London United Kingdom

Original Message:
Sent: 10-07-2021 10:47
From: Sefa Aydemir
Subject: GPU choice & its impact on XPression performance

Hi Simon,

thanx for your qick reply!

I am aware that most of the renderng is taking place in the GPU, but as tried to expain, we don't use designs that utilize complex or many 3D objects. Most of the designs use a fistful of quads. The polygon count is redicoulous for a strong and even for a "weak" 7 year old GPU. That is why I was asking for some deeper understanding WHAT part of the graphics card is responsible (if any!) for the maximum parallel number of full HD streams that my system can handle.

It is kind of a question like "I want to transport as many card boxes as I can with my new truck. So what kind of truck truck would you recommend? One with the extreme horsepower or the other one with the biggest loading volume?"
It leaves me kind of clueless if the advise is "If you buy a new truck, it would be better than your old one. Our trucks are Mercedes trucks." :-) No offends!

I mean, which gear in the system will push the number of HD streams to the max? There must be a difference between a card with big memory and slow/less CUDA cores compared to a card with less memory but faster/more CUDA cores for example.

Could you (or any other community user) provide some more detailed information? That would be great. Thank you :-)

With best regards
Sefa

------------------------------
Sefa Aydemir
On Air Visuals / Switchers and Live Graphics Specialist
MMC Studios Cologne
Cologne Germany

Original Message:
Sent: 10-07-2021 06:26
From: Simon Redmile
Subject: GPU choice & its impact on XPression performance

Most of the rendering is done on the GPU so changing that is the most important component for XPression, the 970 is a 7-year-old card so even changing to something like a 1080ti would be a marked improvement in performance. In our XPression machines, we ship using the P4000 however the GTX gaming cards work very well if you can get one at a reasonable price. XPression is available in 64bit as well, you just need the installer. I recommend contacting our tech support if you'd like the 64bit version.

------------------------------
Simon Redmile
Test Pilot | Senior Graphic Programmer & Designer
Ross Video
London United Kingdom

Original Message:
Sent: 10-07-2021 04:39
From: Sefa Aydemir
Subject: GPU choice & its impact on XPression performance

Hi everyone,

I would like to understand how the choice of the GPU/graphics card is influencing the performance of XPression software. I have built a quite powerful machine in terms of CPU, RAM, diskspeed, pcie bandwidth. It made a great leap regarding the former 10 year old HP Z800 machine. But when I put my old GTX 970 into that machine, I can hardly sense an improvement on how XPression itself is performing (ok, its still 32 bit software so RAM is not used beyond 4GB) away from the overall better Windows performance. I do assume that the Framebuffer is not cruicial, is it? I would expect that the FB is delivered always ONE HD stream for one output as a result of the renderings before - regardless how many streams are combined in one image before output, right?

So can anyone tell me what the main bottleneck is for example in the number of simultaniously played full HD streams? The old machine would begin to drop frames here and there when I would play say 3 full HD streams in parallel. I was expecting a proportional scaling when I have 4 times the pcie bandwidth an more than 20 times the diskspeed. So I assume that the bottleneck seems to be the graphics card. Am I right?

But what properties of the graphics card are most crucial for XPression performance? Is it

- the gpu core count 
- the gpu core clock
- the dedicated graphics memory size
- the memory bandwidth

I could just buy a RTX 3090 for about 3000 € and see what happens ... but still I would not know if the amount of RAM, the core count, the core clock, the memory bandwidth would be the reason for a performance boost. I would never know if a GTX 3060 (around 500 €) for example would have been sufficiant or not (and vice versa, if the performance would not be boosted with a 3060).

So: what can I expect to take the highest impact on video playpack performance?

I would like to avoid spending 3000€ in vain, when it would not outperform the 500 € GPU. I mean it is not about gaming with dozens of powerful rendering tricks like GPU raytracing etc. because XPression does not take advantage of those modern high end features, does it? In my understanding XPression playpack performance is about sheer throughput bandwidth, right?

For example if you compare the GTX 3060 with 12GB but only 192 Bit memory bandwidth and less cores against a GTX 3060 ti with 8GB but with a 256 bit memory bandwith and more cores... what would improve the playback prrformance?
Apart from the fact, that we do not utilize many 3D Objects in our designs... As far as I know XPression does not provide a sophisticated usage of lightning, does not use reflection, refraction, fog, raytracing, scene/depth based blur or other things  It is straight foreward 3D with some basic lightning - period. Right?

I would appreciate any "light" in this for me "shady topic" of GPU capabilities and its dependancy on XPression performance.

If all my above thoughts are crap, please let me know. I also don't quite understand the many "memory allocation" settings on the XPression prefs (I did not touch them so far).
And if someone could share his/her expierience with a 64 bit edition of XPression (and what difference it makes) this would be very interesting too.

Thanks in advance

------------------------------
Sefa Aydemir
On Air Visuals / Switchers and Live Graphics Specialist
MMC Studios Cologne
Cologne Germany
------------------------------