Hi all.

Prelude.

This is going to be lengthy, so please bear with me. You may find it interesting or complete rubbish.

First I'd like to say that the moderators here and few regular contributors are very knowledgeable and have helped /are still helping me a lot.
Without them I doubt I would have my current PC built setup and install of Movie Edit Pro Premium working as well and hassle free as it has been working.
That the odd glitches I've had along the way have been duly sorted by their collective wisdom and knowledge.
There has been however one point of contention I have not been able to come to terms with regarding MEP's performance and handling of both smooth playback and export times.

I have neither ever got export times down to what others have experienced nor had easy times with smooth playback considering how much I have upgraded my PC. Particularly with regard to John EB's claim that an addition of using an NVIDIA card seems to make no difference to export times

I can't remember if John EB has the same view on playback performance or not so I can't comment on that at this time until I get some form of conformation.

What I can say after a lot of testing is that from John EB's viewpoint and experience he is probably and most definitely correct in his observations if my following findings are what the cause of his findings are based upon.   

So,for the sake of this test I tried to keep it simple and not too taxing for any PC setup capable of running MEP Premium.

Windows was set for MEP to use the Intel GPU as 'Power Saving' in the 'Display /  Graphics settings'.
I used the same project for all of my export and playback smoothness tests.
I configured preview and proxy rendering settings were set to 'Best performance for playback (MXV) with Extract audio when creating proxy files.
All video clips were copied into the project folder so as to have the files on my fastest drive to read from.

The Main test Video project was using normal 1080 x 1920 variable bit rate 60fps h264 clips with only cross fades applied from beginning to end. No additional effects added.
I then ran each test on each of the two monitors, one being powered by the Intel Graphics chip and then the following test on the second monitor powered by my
aging NVIDIA card.

This is where I ran into the first possible difference between me and John EBs findings. Where, if John's MEP setup had to follow my setup, John would be perfectly correct and valid about reporting his findings and drawn conclusions.

This is down to how MEP's 'Program Settings' Dialogue box opens in the 'Display options' box and could be why John EB is not seeing any activity or benefit from using the NVIDIA GPU. It is effectively blocked from being used for any task within MEP. I've no idea why but the Task Manager reports no effective activity at all.

[Edit] have changed image file as accidentally uploaded wrong result.

I want to repeat. At this point these are the findings with my PC.

I do not conclude from the past days experiments that the results will be the same for everyone as computer systems differ but I hope others may find this useful.

So at this point I can say is that when I used MEP on the Intel powered monitor the NVIDIA card could do nothing. Playback was slightly glitchier on cross-fades (slowed down)
but not by much.
Export rendering always took longer and by some margin. Up to three times the length of the play time of the video. Cross-fade sections slowed even more.

Note no NVIDIA activity and export time more than project length.

Having MEP placed on my NVIDIA powered screen made the whole experience of using MEP more palatable in every way. I could see the NVIDIA card doing something and varying
The amount of use depending on whether it was at a cross-fade point of not. The Intel GPU 3D rendering at that point always dipped but so did the Intel Video decode on export, but the slowdown was nowhere near as much as when on the other monitor.
In general playback was much better as was scrolling and exporting times fell to below the length of play time of the video. Sometimes up to a third less time.

When using either monitor I saw similar parts of the processing having the same effect on performance while other parts of processing had no effect at all in regards to the Intel GPU or CPU's performance.
It did not seem to matter whether the Intel GPU was processing 3D to over 80% or as little as 10% or less. It varied depending on whether it was dealing with a cross-fade
or when exporting what type of codec was in use.
If and when the NVIDIA card could be pressed into action the Intel GPU took a hit and decreased both 3D and Video decode activity.

How big a hit I can't say or judge as my card is very low powered for this but suspect a higher powered card may reduce the hit to the Intel GPU. I suppose I will just have to wait until such times I may be able to think about getting one.

What I can say is that in my observations, how high in performance I can get the Intel Video Decode line in the graph to stay,
the faster the export times are with all codecs that I used in the tests. So base MP4, H264 and H265. All tests used the best quality settings I could apply.

There were other settings that helped playback smoothness and response times to scrolling and the like.
Adding titling or some effects like masking objects and tracking them made little difference to playback or export times whereas a lot of the third party plugins did slow down exporting a lot during the sections those effects were applied but curiously didn't effect playback that much.

So in conclusion.

On my system at least, using an NVIDIA card and setting up MEP to only be on the monitor powered by the NVIDIA card gives me the best overall playback experience and fastest export times regardless of whether it is HEVC or not.

My other more limited testing using a 4K set of clips and exporting at the same resolution were roughly the same except export times lengthened to roughly just over twice that of the project length.    

During all the testing I took snapshots of the performances of all exports during crossover sections and of final render times.
Labeled which screen they were on and whether the NVIDIA card was selected or not.

I have a few more tests I've thought of to round this all off such as whether to put the editing timeline onto the Intel powered monitor or not but that has just occurred to me.
It is possible to configure MEP to show up in different ways on the monitors anyway and save them as presets so if it turns out it is better to have everything on one screen then I could make a preset for that.

I will let you all know later.

What else am I going to do with my spare lock-down time? 😇

Keep safe and healthy.

Ray.