Will a GPU help reduce my power consumption?

[RegularJoe]

Hi All,

I have three cameras running 720p/30fps and modect on three that ar linked at VGA/5fps

I I have a gpu or cuda will the CPU resources go down? My load looks to go up to 25% and temp around 57c in freenas where xm shows a load of 1-2, this is on my i7 laptop for the moment.

Thanks,
Joe

 

[rvassar]

The problem with HW acceleration is getting it to actually use the HW. Most of the GPU drivers are Linux specific, or at best marginally supported in FreeBSD. Most of the interest is in transcoding for the Plex plugin. I believe Zoneminder will use some of the CPU specific instructions, ala SSEx, but I don't think there's any full GPU acceleration available, nor is there much in the way of support for BSD (the core OS of FreeNAS).

Keep in mind that many *nix utils that return a value for "load" are returning the number of processes or threads that are cleared (not blocked by any other constraint) to schedule on to a CPU. In many cases the process is "single threaded" and will report "1.0" as result of utilizing 100% of one CPU core, leaving the other three cores in your i7 free/idle. Zoneminder's zm[a-c] processes are all single threaded, with a process per camera.

The next thing to address is fine tuning... Do you really need 30fps? Can you get by on 20 fps? 12 fps? It will save both CPU and storage space...

 

[RegularJoe]

30fps is only a test at home, there are other places I want to use ZM and it would be at 10-15fps at most.

I will have to assume that TrueNAS Scale with a ZM plugin might work better or just bite the bullett and do a Linux/ZM dedicated box. I don't want to do that as the ZM plugin on FreeNAS was pain free and a 30 second install.

 

[RegularJoe]

so far I know my video card is detected and even in the jail it looks like it knows a geforce 730 is there

root@zm3:~ # ffmpeg -hwaccels
ffmpeg version 4.3.1 Copyright (c) 2000-2020 the FFmpeg developers
built with FreeBSD clang version 10.0.0 (git@github.com:llvm/llvm-project.git llvmorg-10.0.0-0-gd32170dbd5b)
configuration: --prefix=/usr/local --mandir=/usr/local/man --datadir=/usr/local/share/ffmpeg --pkgconfigdir=/usr/local/libdata/pkgconfig --enable-shared --enable-pic --enable-gpl --enable-avresample --cc=cc --cxx=c++ --disable-alsa --disable-libopencore-amrnb --disable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libaom --disable-libaribb24 --enable-asm --enable-libass --disable-libbs2b --disable-libcaca --disable-libcdio --disable-libcelt --disable-libcodec2 --enable-libdav1d --disable-libdavs2 --disable-libdc1394 --disable-debug --enable-htmlpages --enable-libdrm --disable-libfdk-aac --disable-libflite --enable-fontconfig --enable-libfreetype --enable-frei0r --disable-libfribidi --disable-gcrypt --disable-libglslang --disable-libgme --enable-gmp --enable-gnutls --enable-version3 --disable-libgsm --enable-iconv --disable-libilbc --disable-libjack --disable-libklvanc --disable-libkvazaar --disable-ladspa --enable-libmp3lame --disable-liblensfun --disable-libbluray --disable-librsvg --disable-librtmp --enable-libxml2 --disable-lto --disable-lv2 --disable-mbedtls --disable-libmfx --disable-libmodplug --disable-libmysofa --disable-nonfree --disable-openal --disable-opencl --enable-libopencv --disable-opengl --disable-libopenh264 --disable-libopenjpeg --disable-libopenmpt --disable-openssl --enable-optimizations --enable-libopus --disable-pocketsphinx --disable-libpulse --disable-librabbitmq --disable-librav1e --enable-runtime-cpudetect --disable-librubberband --disable-sdl2 --disable-libsmbclient --disable-libsnappy --disable-sndio --disable-libsoxr --disable-libspeex --disable-libsrt --disable-libssh --disable-libtensorflow --disable-libtesseract --enable-libtheora --disable-libtwolame --enable-libv4l2 --enable-vaapi --disable-vapoursynth --enable-vdpau --disable-libvidstab --disable-libvmaf --enable-libvorbis --disable-libvo-amrwbenc --enable-libvpx --disable-vulkan --disable-libwavpack --disable-libwebp --enable-libx264 --enable-libx265 --disable-libxavs2 --enable-libxcb --enable-libxvid --disable-outdev=xv --disable-libzimg --disable-libzmq --disable-libzvbi
libavutil 56. 51.100 / 56. 51.100
libavcodec 58. 91.100 / 58. 91.100
libavformat 58. 45.100 / 58. 45.100
libavdevice 58. 10.100 / 58. 10.100
libavfilter 7. 85.100 / 7. 85.100
libavresample 4. 0. 0 / 4. 0. 0
libswscale 5. 7.100 / 5. 7.100
libswresample 3. 7.100 / 3. 7.100
libpostproc 55. 7.100 / 55. 7.100
Hardware acceleration methods:
vdpau
vaapi
drm

 

[RegularJoe]

GPU pass thru using nvidia cards is not supported, you may be able to get the onboard to work or an ATI card but no nvidia, in a sense nvidia is blacklisted from BSD and works best if you are using a FreeBSD desktop with the propietary driver from nvidia.

So it looks like I will revisit this with TrueNAS Scale in the future. This is related as it would be a similar process I would have to do with Scale:
https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=89&t=36107

case closed.