Today I ran some tests with Hardware Accelertion on and off.
Test project was pretty simple - 1 min long, 6 clips, some transitions and 1 effect, 1 title - somewhat like it is usually in real life, just way shorter.
Rendering in different formats gave me different CPU and GPU usage levels, for example:
MPEG-4 Custom profile (1920x1080; Frame rate 50p; 13 Mbps bitrate, 100Mb output file size)
Fast video rendering technology - ON; Hardware acc - ON; -
42 seconds. CPU usage - approx. 30-90% GPU usage - none.
Fast video rendering technology - OFF; Hardware acc - OFF; -
1min13sec. CPU usage - approx. 90-99% GPU usage - none.
AVC (1920x1080; Frame rate 50i; 24 Mbps bitrate, 170Mb output file size)
Fast video rendering technology - ON; Hardware acc - ON; -
45 seconds. CPU usage - approx. 50% GPU usage - 15-30%.
Fast video rendering technology - OFF; Hardware acc - OFF; -
1min01sec. CPU usage - approx. 85-97% GPU usage - none.
WMV (1920x1080; Frame rate 25p; 10Mbps bitrate; 77Mb output file size)
Fast video rendering technology - grayed out, unable to switch on. Hardware acc - ON;
2min47sec. CPU usage - approx. 70-80% GPU usage - none
Fast video rendering technology - OFF; Hardware acc - OFF; same results
2min47sec
I tried other formats as well, and got very various results. Sometimes GPU usage was around 5-6%.
During tests with AVC, I found out that it doesn't matter whether you switch on or off hardware acceleration in settings menu. Results change only if you switch Fast video rendering technology (Hardware video encoder) in Produce screen. I didn't try this with others formats.
So all this thing called Hardware Acceleration in PDR 11 is still a little mysterious and puzzling for me.
I didn't notice any quality changes if Hardware acceleration were applied or not. Different story was unusable AVC videos which were rendered in interlaced mode - Windows media player crashed, VLC played with serious combing. But this isn't connected to hardware acc, like I said - different story.
Another reason for these tests was to find best quality/file size relationship. Of course everything looks excellent when 50p are used, but since mostly I upload my videos to YouTube, then its no big deal in the end, since YT downgrades videos to 30 FPS. And AVC format has better sound, since Dolby Digital 5.1 can be applied, bet same story with YT here - it downgrades it.
Hope there is some use from this. My rig specs are below.
i7-3770 | Gigabyte GTX 660 | Asus P8H77-V | Kingston HyperX 16 Gb RAM | Intel 330 180 Gb SSD | 2 Tb Seagate HDD | FSP Raider 550W 85+ | Nexus Prominent R case