Why does PowerDirector 17 consistently use less than 50% of the available CPU capacity on my PC when producing?

My CPU utilisation when producing: a maximum of 51% (48% average)!

Video producing could be twice as fast, if PD17 used the available processing capacity.

PD17 takes on averge approx. 30m to render a 60m H265 video on my workstation, but it could be twice as fast if it fully utilised the available CPU cores and speed. RAM usage was consistently around 5%. SSD read/write was also minimal.

Why does PD17 seriously under-utilise the available hardware resources? What is the limiting factor here? Is there anything that can be done to configure PD17 to use the hardware more fully?

Also, why is "Fast video rendering" (including both "SVRT" and "Intel Quick Sync" unavailable, with this option disabled on the Produce screen?

The spec of my machine is as follows.

• CPUs: 72 (3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Platinum 8124M with Intel Advanced Vector Extension 512 instruction set)


• CPU Cores: 36


• RAM: 144 GB


• SSD2 (location of project and videos): 160MB/sSSD1 (location of OS and PD17): 160MB/s


• OS: Windows Server 2019 (Datacentre Edition) v10.0.17763 [the same build as Windows 10 version 1809]


• No graphics card.
  
  PowerDirector version: 17.3.2721.0 (PowerDIrector 365 type installation)

PDR.exe process priority setting in WIndows: Realtime

PDR.exe Graphics Performance setting in Windows: High Performance

Tested with and without CPU Turbo (3.5 GHz) on a range of projects producing 60 minute videos, both and without extensive effects (e.g. skin smoothing) and enhancements (e.g. colour), in H264 and H264 with various 1080p profiles.

I also ran my benchmarks on comparable rigs including one with an Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 CPU:

- 64 CPUs, with 4 NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs, and and measured no significant performance difference. I used the latest Tesla drivers, and had hardware acceleration enabled and optimised in PD17. PD17 gave me the OpenCL and hardware decoding options. The GPUs were optimised and configured to run at their maximum speed. Each CPU has 2048 parallel processing cores and 8 GB of video memory, plus an on-board hardware video encoder/decoder supporting up to 10 H.265 (HEVC) 1080p30 streams and up to 18 H.264 1080p30 streams simultaneously.

- 96 CPUs, and 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, each pairing 5,120 CUDA Cores and 640 Tensor Cores! I used the latest CUDA drivers, and had hardware acceleration enabled and optimised in PD17. PD17 gave me the OpenCL and hardware decoding options. The GPUs were optimised and configured to run at their maximum speed.

CONCLUSION

As you upgrade your hardware, PD17 hits a performance wall where it cannot go any faster. When you hit that limit, which is surprsingly low, no hardware upgrades can make video production any faster. CyberLink customers need to be aware of what these limits are, so they don't waste money on hardware capacity that will not be used. You could invest in more CPUs, better CPUs, more CPU cores, and you could install 24TB of RAM, and you could add more GPUs, faster GPUs, with more on-board graphics memory, and after a point none of it will speed-up video production because PD will not use it. My current video-editing workstation spec. (10 June 2019):

* CPUs: 96 Intel Xeon P-8175M (3.1 GHz turbo)
* GPU: 8 NVIDIA Tesla M60 - driver v25.21.14.2531
* RAM: 512GB
* SSDs: 256GB 500MB/s (C - OS), 512GB 500MB/s (D - Data)
* OS: Windows Server 2019 (Datacentre Edition) v10.0.17763
* PowerDirector v17.3.2721.0 (365)