Sizing a GPU

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danletkeman

Getting the hang of it
Apr 5, 2023
50
31
Canada
Hello,

I have an E5-2630 v3 Xeon running ESXi 7 with a Windows 10 Guest VM. I tried setting up one camera on this server and it pinned the CPU at 100%. If I enabled the sub stream I could get it down to about 20%. Not sure why the CPU usage was so high, no matter what settings I used it never worked very well, even with just one camera.

I am assuming that a GPU will fix this issue, and I am wondering how to size a GPU. I have never purchased one before and I am green when it comes to specs. I would like it to be capable of handling 20-30 4K cameras at 10-15 fps using CPAI and dual streams. The goal would be to have excellent performance for the users using the system.

For example an Nvidia P4 GPU spec sheet says it can transcode 35 HD videos streams in the spec sheet:


However that is just HD and not 4K. With 4K it might be capable of 9 streams a once and with 20-30 cameras there could be a chance that more than 9 have motion at once.

What size GPU card would I need to accomplish this?

The other option that is on the table would be to run a separate machine with an 8th or 9th gen I7 and see how that works with that many cameras. I just wanted to avoid having another computer to run and maintain in the rack.
 
A GPU will not substantially change the CPU usage unless you are running AI on the computer as well. Although you might think a CCTV camera needs a GPU to work due to the fact it's video you will end up looking at, it's still just a bunch of 1's and O's coming through a ethernet line. If you use another device to view the stream on, there is almost nothing for a GPU in the BI server to actually do.

If the system is struggling with handling even one camera, there is something wrong with the setup. Perhaps you didn't grant enough CPU and memory to the VM? Or perhaps there is something in the VM that is causing the system to act weirdly, but it wouldn't experience this same issue on a "metal" installation on that machine.
 
The Automation Guy said:
That VM should work fine to run BI. There is just something weird going on that needs to be corrected IMHO.
Click to expand...

I'm going to check tomorrow, but maybe I need to review all of the settings again. Do you know if there is a debug logging system for BI that I can use to narrow down the reason?
 
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