Hardware acceleration (explained)

Select Automatic to enable hardware accelerated video motion detection. This is the default setting when you add a camera. The recording server is now using GPU resources if they are available. This will reduce the CPU load during video motion analysis and improve the general performance of the recording server.

Hardware accelerated video motion detection uses GPU resources on:

The load balancing between the different resources is done automatically. In the System Monitor node you can verify if the current motion analysis load on the NVIDIA GPU resources is within the specified limits from the System Monitor Thresholds node. The NVIDIA GPU load indicators are:

Tip: If the load is too high, you can add GPU resources to your recording server by installing multiple NVIDIA display adapters. Milestone does not recommend the use of Scalable Link Interface (SLI) configuration of your NVIDIA display adapters.

NVIDIA products have different compute capabilities. To verify that your NVIDIA product supports hardware acceleration for the codecs used in your Milestone XProtect system, look up the supported codecs for the compute capability version in the table below.

To find out the compute capability version for your NVIDIA product, visit the NVIDIA website.

Compute capability

Architecture

H.264

H.265

3.x

Kepler

-

5.x

Maxwell

-

6.x

Pascal

7.x

Volta

To see if video motion detection is hardware accelerated for a specific camera, enable logging on the recoding server log file. Set level to Debug and diagnostics is logged to the DeviceHandling.log. The log follows the pattern:
[time] [274] DEBUG – [guid] [name] Configured decoding: Automatic: Actual decoding: Intel/NVIDIA

The OS version of the recording server and CPU generation may impact performance of hardware accelerated video motion detection. GPU memory allocation is often the bottleneck with older versions (typical limit is between 0.5 GB and 1.7 GB).

Systems based on Windows 10 / Server 2016 and 6th generation CPU (Skylake) or newer can allocate 50% of system memory to GPU and thereby removing or reducing this bottleneck.

6th generation Intel CPUs does provide hardware accelerated decoding of H.265, so the performance is comparable with H.264 for these versions of CPU.

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