Lower CPU Load

Hey Community.

Does everyone of you know the GPU Driver Option about the amount of prerendered images?

i bet.

I googled it up today cause i really did never touched that option and did not really know what it does.
What i found out:

Lower it to reduce CPU load and higher it to lower GPU load.
wtf? i dont think it will increase anything on my performance.
I m streaming on 720p with this preset with gives me 5% less quality of encoding but 45% faster encoding.

partitions=p8x8,b8x8,i8x8,i4x4 bframes=2 ref=1 me=dia subme=1 mixed-refs=off weightb=off

All on my old Q6600 @3,4 Ghrz

The results where... i cant believe it to be honest.
I had around 80fps while streaming League Of Legends but ugly stutterings while scrolling around the map in 720p.

i lowered the amount of prerendered images to the lowest number..."1" in theory while streaming my system is hard cpu limiting so everything that lowers my cpu pressure is welcome.
i started a game...my fps got a boost up to 180...thats 100fps more...and not even one stutter while scrolling the map

:O what the...


If anyone out there having an old or low end cpu...that may work for you. setting the amount to the lowest number pretty much forces your system to render everythin on your gpu and dont do prerenderings on your cpu.

To be honest, I think it's more likely due to your ref, me, and subme settings that are contributing to the performance. The prerendered frames thing may help reduce GPU load I guess, but I have a hard time seeing that you get about 100FPS boost by simply changing that.

Hey there,
you didnt mention which preset you were using combined with your encoder settings.
On very fast: ref, mixed-refs, weightb are all set as you described them by default. The partition table is also the default one.
me=dia and bframes=2 might reduce the encoder usage very slightly.

I guess your conclusion is correct, setting the prerendered frames to 1 (on ATI graphics cards, thats the Flip-Queue Size apparently) can help your performance because the CPU has to gather less information (only information for 1 frame instead of 3) it then sends to the GPU for rendering.

Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames:

If available, this option - previously known as 'Max Frames to Render Ahead' - controls the number of frames the CPU prepares in advanced of being rendered by the GPU. The default value is 3 - higher values tend to result in smoother but more laggy gameplay, while lower values can help reduce mouse and keyboard lag. However extremely low values such as 0 may hurt performance, so I recommend this option be kept at its default of 3 globally, and only adjusted downwards in specific game profiles. Remember, in most cases mouse lag is due to low framerates, so adjusting this option is not an automatic cure to lag issues, nor should it be the first thing you try. Finally, it only works in DirectX games, not OpenGL games.

Click to expand...

If someone knows more about this, please correct me. But rendering is always done on the GPU, no matter what. (The fps performance would be way worse if the CPU had to render as well)

Krazy said:

To be honest, I think it's more likely due to your ref, me, and subme settings that are contributing to the performance. The prerendered frames thing may help reduce GPU load I guess, but I have a hard time seeing that you get about 100FPS boost by simply changing that.

Click to expand...

That doesnt make sense. I m using my ref and subme presets for weeks. i onlychanged my prerendered images NOW.
I dont get more fps now cause i changed my preset 3 Weeks ago. (Very fast btw)

I dont want to even diskuss if i really have more fps cause of that or not. cause i am the one sitting in front of my pc, i changed that, i tried out alot of settings and i ve got more fps...a huge load more fps. One reason could be that my L3-Cache is exhausted and that option is lowering the pressure on it a bit but...
I dont even have the time to justify myself and diskuss about something that works great for me.
Test it out, maybe it works for you, maybe not. or just ignore it

i just want to help people out with low end CPU´s to get more performance, Is your CPU running @ 95-100% Load? I guess then you wont even see a difference anyways.

softlight said:

partitions=p8x8,b8x8,i8x8,i4x4 bframes=2 ref=1 me=dia subme=1 mixed-refs=off weightb=off

Click to expand...

Just a note, the correct entries to turn off mixed-refs and weightb are:

no-mixed-refs and no-weightb

Thank you very much for the tip! Now I'm experiencing much smoother gameplay and improved stream quality, because I was able to select one step slower h264 processing. Thanks again! ^^

Thanks for the info. This has definitely helped me and I did some experimenting with what was giving me the most speedup. "subme=1" gave me a tremendous speedup.