AMD cpus recommended for Blue Iris machine

malkazoid

malkazoid

n3wb
May 8, 2021
9
4
Southern Europe
Hi everyone,

Reading the excellent resource for picking a cpu that will perform well for Blue Iris, the one big thing missing was AMD. 100% of the cpus recommended in the resource are Intel cpus.
My guess is this is an omission, rather than a reflection of AMD cpus being incapable of running Blue Iris well (LOL)...

Has anyone had any experience using Blue Iris with lower end, or mid-range older AMD cpus (like first gen ryzen)?
 
Recent thread with some info:

New BI computer

I the process of throwing together a new BI computer, Current machine is a i7 6700K it was built using the oldest machine in the house, now that I have proven it works fine I am going to upgrade that machine to future proof it a bit more. It is running 32GB of DDR 4 3200 has 24 TB of WD purple...
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
 
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The real question you should be asking is if the cameras have substream availability. If so, then the choice of CPU begins to becomes largely irrelevant (within reason). I run all my BI installations in VMs so I have no access to QS. One of the VM hosts is a Ryzen5 1600AF CPU. But because all my cameras can use substreams, not having QS doesn't matter. The load on the CPU is dramatically lower with substreams than without.
 
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biggen said:
The real question you should be asking is if the cameras have substream availability. If so, then the choice of CPU begins to becomes largely irrelevant (within reason). I run all my BI installations in VMs so I have no access to QS. One of the VM hosts is a Ryzen5 1600AF CPU. But because all my cameras can use substreams, not having QS doesn't matter. The load on the CPU is dramatically lower with substreams than without.
Click to expand...

They do...
Interesting you are running BI on VMs... I believed I couldn't do that because I would need bare metal performance.
Makes me want to test things out with a VM on my QNAP. Its CPU isn't too shabby.
 
malkazoid said:
They do...
Interesting you are running BI on VMs... I believed I couldn't do that because I would need bare metal performance.
Makes me want to test things out with a VM on my QNAP. Its CPU isn't too shabby.
Click to expand...
Give it a try. In my home BI installation, I have 5 4MP cams all running 20fps. I use Proxmox as the host and have 4 cores and 6GB assigned to the BI VM. Here is the CPU performance. I average about 10% CPU usage during the day using substreams.

Screenshot from 2021-05-09 10-30-09.png
 
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biggen said:
The real question you should be asking is if the cameras have substream availability. If so, then the choice of CPU begins to becomes largely irrelevant (within reason). I run all my BI installations in VMs so I have no access to QS. One of the VM hosts is a Ryzen5 1600AF CPU. But because all my cameras can use substreams, not having QS doesn't matter. The load on the CPU is dramatically lower with substreams than without.
Click to expand...

You weren't kidding about substreams. Curiosity got the better of me and I hooked up a couple of cams and installed Blue Iris on my main workstation (16 core Threadripper). Just to have a play before I setup a Windows VM on my NAS.
A couple of 8mp cameras initially had the cpu usage at 14%. After going through the recommended optimisations, including substreams, usage plummeted to 2%.

I noticed there are quite a few hardware decoding options beyond Quicksync. Most of them were Intel or Nvidia based (and I definitely don't want a GPU to be part of the picture), but there were a couple of DirectX options I thought couldn't hurt to try. That did seem to have an effect.

Thanks for the tips.
 
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I tested on a J1900 Intel Celeron quad core with intel GPU against a Ryzen 3 2200g. The old Intel performed way better than the AMD. I've been testing for my new set up a new Intel I3 -10100 and doesnt break a sweat with Deepstack.

Intel Quicksync is just the best way to go for a Blue Iris box.
 
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BORIStheBLADE said:
I tested on a J1900 Intel Celeron quad core with intel GPU against a Ryzen 3 2200g. The old Intel performed way better than the AMD. I've been testing for my new set up a new Intel I3 -10100 and doesnt break a sweat with Deepstack.

Intel Quicksync is just the best way to go for a Blue Iris box.
Click to expand...
Performed way better even with sub streams enabled? CPU usage is so low with sub streams its hard to even measure the performance against different CPU’s from my experience.
 
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fenderman said:
This will depend on the image resolution you send to deepstack, the number of images simultaneously sent to DS and whether you run DS in high mode or the default medium
Click to expand...

I agree I probably should have been more specific with those settings in Deepstack. I guess more are using Deepstack with substream? I currently have it set up with high resolution, medium and 5 pictures. I also don't have a lot of cameras compared to some on here..
 
biggen said:
Performed way better even with sub streams enabled? CPU usage is so low with sub streams its hard to even measure the performance against different CPU’s from my experience.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty certain when I tested I enabled the substreams. I just don't remember for sure. Maybe I'll give it a quick try tonight when I get a chance.
 
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biggen said:
Performed way better even with sub streams enabled? CPU usage is so low with sub streams its hard to even measure the performance against different CPU’s from my experience.
Click to expand...

So with substreams its pretty close. The only difference is the AMD cpu usage doesn't drop when the BI window is close. the Intel will drop to 10% ish. So with that being said.... This little cute Intel thats four years older and not a proper desktop CPU held its own pretty good.
 
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malkazoid said:
They do...
Interesting you are running BI on VMs... I believed I couldn't do that because I would need bare metal performance.
Makes me want to test things out with a VM on my QNAP. Its CPU isn't too shabby.
Click to expand...
BI 4 and 5 will both run on a VM. You may have to help 4 a little. I have a copy of 5 running on Hyper-v with no problems.
I had plenty of server space and CPU time, so tried it, a year later, it's still there. I have even played with cutting the CPU
and memory back to see how far it will go. If you have 4 4mp cameras, and you use sub streams, you really don't need much,
until you do an upgrade, or the 2am housekeeping.
More then 4-6 cameras, I would suggest going for a separate PC and run it as intended.
 
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Old Timer said:
BI 4 and 5 will both run on a VM. You may have to help 4 a little. I have a copy of 5 running on Hyper-v with no problems.
Click to expand...

It is very rare for software to have a problem running on a VM. Blue Iris has no problem with it. The only difficulty you might have is trying to pass through graphics hardware to the VM for Blue Iris to be able to use hardware acceleration.
 
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bp2008 said:
It is very rare for software to have a problem running on a VM. Blue Iris has no problem with it. The only difficulty you might have is trying to pass through graphics hardware to the VM for Blue Iris to be able to use hardware acceleration.
Click to expand...

Any tips for passing through the graphics hardware? I'm using Virtualisation Station on a QNAP.
EDIT: I think I've found a resource!
www.qnap.com

How to set up and use GPU pass-through in Virtualization Station 3

Overview What is GPU pass-through? When a graphics card is installed in a QNAP NAS, you can assign it to a virtual machine (VM) ...
www.qnap.com www.qnap.com
 
malkazoid said:
Any tips for passing through the graphics hardware? I'm using Virtualisation Station on a QNAP.
EDIT: I think I've found a resource!
www.qnap.com

How to set up and use GPU pass-through in Virtualization Station 3

Overview What is GPU pass-through? When a graphics card is installed in a QNAP NAS, you can assign it to a virtual machine (VM) ...
www.qnap.com www.qnap.com
Click to expand...

How is BI running on the VM in QNAP?

I have maybe 10 cameras at my house, but I want to add a few cameras at our house near the beach. I have a VPN set up there- but the upload speed isn't great. I have ordered one camera and plan on getting two of those Dahua "Boobie" camera- (5 cameras total).

I won't want to build a PC there- but I do want to buy a NAS. if I can run a Windows instance and get BI running on it-- that would be great. I ran BI on a VM before and it ran well until I hit about 6-7 cameras.
 
wittaj said:
Recent thread with some info:

New BI computer

I the process of throwing together a new BI computer, Current machine is a i7 6700K it was built using the oldest machine in the house, now that I have proven it works fine I am going to upgrade that machine to future proof it a bit more. It is running 32GB of DDR 4 3200 has 24 TB of WD purple...
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
Click to expand...

I commented in that thread;

Apr 26, 2021

I built a Ryzen PC prior to knowing it would be running Blue Iris, it runs fine with no issues. So far I have only tested with two Dahua/Andy cameras recording 24/7 but it only uses about 7 - 8% of the CPU and less than a GB of RAM. It uses about 10% of CPU with two recording and playing back or reviewing video.

WIN 10 and Ryzen 7 2700 with 16GB of RAM.

As an update, now running three Dahua (Empire Tech/Andy) cameras recording 24/7, using about 10 % of the CPU and 1.5 GB of RAM.
 
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Rob2020 said:
I commented in that thread;

Apr 26, 2021

I built a Ryzen PC prior to knowing it would be running Blue Iris, it runs fine with no issues. So far I have only tested with two Dahua/Andy cameras recording 24/7 but it only uses about 7 - 8% of the CPU and less than a GB of RAM. It uses about 10% of CPU with two recording and playing back or reviewing video.

WIN 10 and Ryzen 7 2700 with 16GB of RAM.

As an update, now running three Dahua (Empire Tech/Andy) cameras recording 24/7, using about 10 % of the CPU and 1.5 GB of RAM.
Click to expand...
Are you utilizing substreams? What is the resolution and FPS of the cameras? Are you direct to disk? Saying you are using Ryzen is great, but we need more details in order to truly understand BI performance on Ryzen.
 
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