better graphics card useful?

[70hundert]

Hi there!

I recently bought Resoulme Avenue which I mainly want to use for personal stuff, like streaming with OBS and do some VJing while mixing.

At the moment I'm using a Desktop-PC with 8-core 3.2 GHZ (AMD FX-8320E) with 32 GB RAM (where only 24 GB are used - have to look into this as well), different HDD's (the one that serves Resolume is a SSD-Drive with 1 GB) and I have installed two graphics cards:

- AMD Radeon R5 200 Series
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 750 Ti

When running all the programs I need my CPU usage is at 90%+, sometimes 100% (as the Task-Manager tells me). Inside Resoulme I've got the following resources-usage:

- CPU: around 80 - 95 %
- RAM: around 60 - 80%
- VRAM: around 85 - 95 %

So my question is if buying a better graphics card with more RAM can help me lowering the resources-usage? I do not need any special outputs for the graphics-card, since I'm only outputting via NDI to OBS.

Or does changing the gaphics-card doesn't help that much, so it's better to use a separate Desktop-PC or Laptop to only run Resolume on that?

Any tipps and hints are much appreciated.

Greetings from Germany

[Zoltán]

Resolume shows the system usage stats, not what only Resolume uses.
What programs are using the CPU, and using the lot of RAM?

Have you tried direct output capture in OBS instead of NDI?

[70hundert]

Hello Zoltan, and thanks a lot for your answer!

I'm using several programs while streaming, for being able to capture different mobile-device-cams etc. But most of the RAM and the CPU is used by Resolume - about 40-50% of CPU and 2.5 GB of RAM. I have to admit that I'm using quite a lot of images, large videos and also many effects, so I might have overdone it

Sometimes OBS takes as much on CPU, but much less on RAM - just 250-500 MB. While testing now I had a CPU usage of ~5%, so this looks good to me right now. I'll keep an eye on that...

Have you tried direct output capture in OBS instead of NDI?

With this you mean "Fullscreen", "Window" or "Advanced"? I always used NDI, so I need to check this out. Is there a quality difference between those outputs?

[Zoltán]

With this you mean "Fullscreen", "Window" or "Advanced"? I always used NDI, so I need to check this out. Is there a quality difference between those outputs?

Yes direct capture would be better image quality too, but the real benefit of the direct capture would be, that the machine doesn't need to CPU encode and decode the NDI streams.

[70hundert]

Yes direct capture would be better image quality too, but the real benefit of the direct capture would be, that the machine doesn't need to CPU encode and decode the NDI streams.

Thanks again, I'm gonna try this out.

But in general, can you tell if it makes a big difference when I buy a graphics-card with 8 or 16 GB RAM, instead of the weak-one with 2 GB I'm using right now?

[Zoltán]

It only makes a difference if you try to use more than the amount of VRAM the GPU has, then things slow down a lot because the driver will swap textures to system RAM, if it doesn't crash first.

[70hundert]

Sorry Zoltan, I totally forgot about getting back to you and your help, which I really appreciate!

So I first did change a lot of thing inside OBS on how I implemented the mobile-device-cams (instead of "window caputre" i chose "vlc video source") which already helped a lot on the CPU usage.

I did finally buy a new graphics card, a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 with 6 GB RAM. This also helped a lot and made Resolume work and act much more stable.

Since I still had some issues with my (old) computer I decided to buy a new one (i7-9700 3 Ghz, 32 GB RAM) with the same graphics card (RTX 2060/6GB) and let them both do the work: old computer handles the OBS-broadcast and the mobile-device-cams, new computer handles Resolume with everything (different layers,effects, etc) and sending the signal via NDI to the old PC. This kinda works, but I still get BSOD on my old computer - but this not related to Resolume at all!

So as a resume in my experience the better graphics card already helped a lot in my situation.

Thanks again for helping,

Marc