Quote Why is this happening and what can I do to stop this behavior?

It's almost certainly due to the specific edits on your timeline. Not every section of every project can benefit from (or even use) hardware encoding.

For example, if your last section has clips with LUTs applied, that correction has to be done by the CPU before anything else can happen and the GPU will sit mostly idle during that period.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Quote

It's almost certainly due to the specific edits on your timeline. Not every section of every project can benefit from (or even use) hardware encoding.

For example, if your last section has clips with LUTs applied, that correction has to be done by the CPU before anything else can happen and the GPU will sit mostly idle during that period.

Thank you for your reply. It appears to me that hardware accelerated encoding actually never kicks in on some of my renders regardless of the content of my video. I am not using LUTs and my footage is from a gopro hero7, most of which is 1080p at 60fps with 45mbps bit rate. My most recent render of a 6Gb file took over 3.5 hours in Powerdirector with GPU activity hovering at 7-8% and CPU % never exceeding 50%. This is on a Ryzen 5 2600 . RX 570 and 16Gb of ram. I can render a 30Gb video in Handbrake in 2 hours using CPU only or in less than 30 minutes using GPU hardware encoding.

Is there something wrong with my installation? Do I need to re-install Powerdirector?

If you're able to produce high quality videos using PD15, then nothing is wrong and there's no reason to uninstall/reinstall it. Although it might not seem like it, there are often too many subtle variables to make a direct comparison between Handbrake and PD.

For example, the output profile you choose for PD can be the sole reason that producing a 6GB HD video takes 3 hours or 3 minutes, even with the exact same timeline edits.

If you'd like to see if other people get similar or very different results, you'd need to share your specific project which includes all your source clips. To do that, use Pack Project Materials... under the File menu and save everything to a cloud folder on Google Drive or OneDrvie and paste a shareable link here.

If you're not comfortable doing that, upload a short sample vid from your Hero 7 so we can at least see what the best output profile would be for your projects.

Please see the Share a file publicly section in this Google FAQ page, or check this OneDrive support page if you need more info.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Quote Thank you for your reply. It appears to me that hardware accelerated encoding actually never kicks in on some of my renders regardless of the content of my video. I am not using LUTs and my footage is from a gopro hero7, most of which is 1080p at 60fps with 45mbps bit rate. My most recent render of a 6Gb file took over 3.5 hours in Powerdirector with GPU activity hovering at 7-8% and CPU % never exceeding 50%. This is on a Ryzen 5 2600 . RX 570 and 16Gb of ram. I can render a 30Gb video in Handbrake in 2 hours using CPU only or in less than 30 minutes using GPU hardware encoding.

bctf1, your 50% CPU usage is probably more like 100% on physical cores as you probably have SMT activated. I've not seen PD take significant of advantage of that technology, but your real CPU load is now calculated based on 50% more procs than physical, so often the low perceived use. Have you verified, is you light GPU load just decoding?

RX570 has never been real compliant with PD in my view, I've posted several threads on issues previously, often you got a fraction of the profile bitrate and it often capped well under 45Mbps. These users also had issues, https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/82704.page#post_box_340828 one donated his RX580 to daughter. In my view you are probably better off using your CPU for encoding with PD15.

Jeff

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bctf1, your 50% CPU usage is probably more like 100% on physical cores as you probably have SMT activated. I've not seen PD take significant of advantage of that technology, but your real CPU load is now calculated based on 50% more procs than physical, so often the low perceived use. Have you verified, is you light GPU load just decoding?

RX570 has never been real compliant with PD in my view, I've posted several threads on issues previously, often you got a fraction of the profile bitrate and it often capped well under 45Mbps. These users also had issues, https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/82704.page#post_box_340828 one donated his RX580 to daughter. In my view you are probably better off using your CPU for encoding with PD15.

Jeff

Thank you for your reply. My GPU load of only 7-8% is definately encoding load. In your opinion, would my Quadro P400 be more effective for hardware accelerated encoding in PD 15 Ultra since it has an NVENC chip? It makes my wonder after reading the following statement in the link you provided:

"PD does not have any CUDA based encoders, they simply use the Nvidia NVENC and NVDEC for encoding and decoding".

Quote Thank you for your reply. My GPU load of only 7-8% is definately encoding load. In your opinion, would my Quadro P400 be more effective for hardware accelerated encoding in PD 15 Ultra since it has an NVENC chip? It makes my wonder after reading the following statement in the link you provided:

"PD does not have any CUDA based encoders, they simply use the Nvidia NVENC and NVDEC for encoding and decoding".

bctf1, 7-8% GPU load and maybe 100% CPU load after you adjust for SMT use, which you never clarified, would be very odd if GPU is doing encoding. These type of numbers really more inline with GPU decoding, CPU encoding as long as just video transcoding and no LUTS, color corrections, stabilization....so on.

Concerning P400, it will be similar to any of the GeForce 10 series which has lots of forum experience. For PD15, this however is true, https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/80021.page#post_box_329037

This link may give you a little comparison vs your RX570, https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/65974.page#post_box_300990

Jeff