That windows help virtual agent is the most idiotic thing MS has foisted on the world. Every time I use it, it gets confused, delivers wrong answers. For example, on a win10-2004 platform, asking it about 'hardware accelerated scheduling' gets an answer about CISCO vpn's.
So, since you say this is a feature of win10-2004, where is a good link to more details?

Using Cortana and typing led to this informative page after about three interactions: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/enable-hardware-accelerated-gpu-scheduling#:~:text=Hardware%20Accelerated%20GPU%20Scheduling%20enables%20more%20efficient%20GPU,This%20reduces%20latency%20%26%20increases%20video%20playback%20performance and this: https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/07/07/windows-10-hardware-accelerated-gpu-scheduling-explained/ .

Thanks for that.
Interesting. But it seems to only apply to multiple dipslays and nvidia graphics cards - or that is what the set-up process in the first link indicates.
Is there any information re whether it applies to single displays and an Intel quicksync graphics system? That is, a single display, Intel cpu PC (which would have to be close to a majority of platforms windows runs on).

Do a search on this forum for GPU Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling. There is a recent thread in which tests show no difference in rendering speed. The 2nd link above states that users of low and mid-tier CPUs may see improvement in gaming. Users and contributors in the PD Forums more than likely have a high end cpu and that may be the reason no real improvement in encoding speed was seen.

You may want to do an encoding test with your pc using the sample clips to determine if it is faster with it enabled on your pc and post the results and details on your pc so we can know more.

Thinking about how to do that, or more specifically, which clips to use that might give meaningful results, consider this contradiction:

• a graphics GPU is mainly used to speed up the presentation of imagery (graphics) on a screen by unloading that compute intensive part from the main cpu. And thus the association with games, and video more generally.


• in video editing, the most compute intensive element is rendering, and a common theme is that GPU speeds up rendering. Discussions about it cite times with and without a GPU.


• but in rendering editors just don't present any of the project imagery to a screen; it's background process.

So, just why would you need a GPU to speed up rendering?? a better/faster cpu - mentioned in the prior post - and software that took advantage of the built in hardware capbilites that have existed for years seems a much more broadly applicable approach.

I think that people get fixated on this subject in the same way that 'gamers' get fixated on FPS. When running a video game, it really doesn't matter what your FPS is, as long as the game is running smoothly on your system. In Power Director, as long as the rendering process is smooth and accurate then you're in good shape. I use PD18 Ultimate on my laptop which has a GTX1060 GPU. The GPU handles about 50 percent of the load during rendering. The 'Produce' process takes about 40 percent of the time of total duration of the project. I don't know how that compares with other systems, but I'm perfectly happy with it.

I add this comment for completeness:

Last week I did a Host Refresh of Win10 (that is, an in-place update, keeping my files and apps) from 19042.572 to .685.

After I did this, my trick of getting HWA to work on PD 18 stopped working.

Then I noticed that during the Refresh, Windows had dropped back to an older (standard) driver for my UHD 630, instead of the October 2020 (DCH) release that I had installed when my trick worked. (The old driver was from 2019.)

I updated the UHD driver to 27.20.100.8935 and now I can get nVidia HWA to work in PD 18 again.

So, I had initially said that it was a later version of Win10 (20H2) AND Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling that allowed PD 18 to see the nVidia. But it might be that the only thing that one needs is a later UHD driver.

Or perhaps one needs all three (latest Windows, later UHD driver, and H-a GPU Scheduling). Or some permutation of the three.

As they say in textbooks, I leave this exercise to the reader.