Question about GPU memory usage

[Tom80765412]

Hi everyone,

 

I have noticed that while I am watching videos on Youtube the memory usage increases of my GPU (NVIDIA RTX 3070 8gb).

See Attached Image.

I googled about this and I found out it has something to do with "Use hardware acceleration when available" in Mozilla Firefox.

I also read somewhere that disabling this will increase load on the CPU (Intel i5-12400) instead of GPU.

 

So which option is better? Is it better to put load on GPU while watching videos or live streams? Which option will lower the overall power consumption?

 

[WhitetailAni]

Your GPU has a dedicated hardware video encoder. It's not using much power using that dedicated video encoder.

Your CPU does not have a dedicated hardware video encoder, so it will have to run that in software. This uses more power. 

[Tetras]

Just now, Tom80765412 said:

So which option is better? Is it better to put load on GPU while watching videos or live streams? Which option will lower the overall power consumption?

Try it and tell us 

 

If your 3070 is running at max memory clock while you're watching then I strongly suspect the CPU will be better.

[TatamiMatt]

14 minutes ago, Tetras said:

Try it and tell us 

 

If your 3070 is running at max memory clock while you're watching then I strongly suspect the CPU will be better.

Id wager the opposite personally, as if its running at max, memory must be transferring quickly from GPU to VRAM, whereas running on the CPU the memory used will be RAM, and will be much slower

[Alex Atkin UK]

20 minutes ago, WhitetailAni said:

Your GPU has a dedicated hardware video encoder. It's not using much power using that dedicated video encoder.

Your CPU does not have a dedicated hardware video encoder, so it will have to run that in software. This uses more power. 

Technically the 12400 DOES have dedicated hardware encode/decode, in the iGPU.  But when you have an NVIDIA dGPU its mostly useful for video editing as it supports a few formats that NVIDIA do not.

 

For playback I'd think it most efficient to decode the video on the GPU that is actually handling the display output as it can put it straight into video memory.

[Tetras]

23 minutes ago, TatamiMatt said:

Id wager the opposite personally, as if its running at max, memory must be transferring quickly from GPU to VRAM, whereas running on the CPU the memory used will be RAM, and will be much slower

Running at max memory clock usually increases the idle/video playback power consumption by a lot, so that's why I suspect the power usage will be lower using the 12400 instead of the 3070.

[TatamiMatt]

9 minutes ago, Tetras said:

Running at max memory clock usually increases the idle/video playback power consumption by a lot, so that's why I suspect the power usage will be lower using the 12400 instead of the 3070.

Ah i see, i thought you meant the CPU would perform better