Mac Pro 5,1 and OpenCore
I decided today to upgrade my Mac Pro 5,1 to Catalina (using Dosdude1 patched installer). Afterwards, I installed OpenCore to enable a boot screen for my unpatched AMD Radeon RX 850 metal card. One of the features of OpenCore is enabling AMD H264 / HEVC hardware decode + encode in Mojave or later. I don't recall SecuritySpy's exact CPU usage prior to OpenCore, but I think with all 13 cameras being viewed, usage was probably around 40-50%. After installing OpenCore, SecuritySpy CPU usage is hovering around 1.5%. That's quite a big boost in performance. Right now, I'm just viewing the cameras on the Mac Pro since recording is done via my Mac Mini. I'm curious, if I move my license copy of SS back to my Mac Pro, would SS benefit from this performance boost when recording video.
Comments
Have you implemented this procedure for enabling AMD H264 / HEVC hardware decode + encode (on the RX580) in later versions of macOS — more specifically Ventura? I have a 2010 12-core with NVIDIA GT630 / 2, and it won't decode video streams from my low-end Amcrest PoE cameras in Ventura 13.2. The identical setup (cameras / hardware) and the same version of SecuritySpy (5.5.4) work like a charm in Big Sur (on a separate PCIe bootable SSD). I skipped over Monterey on this machine; Ventura is also on its own PCIe drive (both SSDs are Samsung 970).
Also...I ordered a RX580 / 4 flashed card from macvidcards.com yesterday. A worthy upgrade at a very decent price, even if it doesn't put me on the road to solving this particular problem.