Slow GPU perfomance in Linux

[wafffles]

I have an Nvidia Geforce GT 720 graphics card and I’ve been dual booting Windows 10 / Ubuntu 21.10 for the past couple of months. One thing I’ve noticed is that when I do any video encoding, for example using Avidemux or Handbrake, the performance of the card is much slower on Ubuntu than on Windows. Some comparisons on framerates here For Avidemux I took a mkv and a ts file, selected 'Nvidia H264' under video outp - Pastebin.com

I’ve tried changing drivers from recommended (470) to earlier drivers, and tried manually installing the 470 driver as well, but no change. The only setting I see that I’ve changed is in opengl settings where I change picture from ‘quality’ to ‘high performance’, but that doesn’t seem to help either. nvidia-smi shows no processes, either before, during, or after starting encoding.

While it’s an old card now, I’ve had no trouble at all with it on Windows and I was hoping that it would perform at about the same on Ubuntu. Is there a setting I’m missing? It seems to work otherwise, video playback seems normal, just video encoding is much slower. Thanks for any help!

[generix]

Low end gpus don’t support listing processes and most nvidia-smi output, you can only check nvidia-settings for “Video Engine Utilization”
Most low-end nvidia gpus also don’t have an encoder at all, some MX models not even a decoder so you can count yourself lucky.
Next part is the software, Handbrake on Linux doesn’t support nvenc in GUI, only experimental on CLI
https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/technical/video-nvenc.html
Avidemux AFAIK needs a special build of ffmpeg installed for nvenc to work.
So I guess your gpu and driver are allright, it’s just not being used and falls back to cpu encoding.

[wafffles]

That makes a lot of sense, thank you! So even if I upgraded my graphics card I would most likely run into the same problems with those softwares in linux. I’ll look into what I need to do for ffmpeg