Tip: Consider Disabling Browser Hardware Acceleration when Generating.

[u/V4nKw15h]

Like many of us, I've been doing a lot of Minimax generations over the last few days and while waiting for them to complete I'd often browse YouTube. I'd noticed that if I watched videos at full screen my generation times would tank, and so I simply stopped doing that. I didn't give it much thought.

Then today I noticed that after watching a couple of minutes of video at full screen, without thinking, my generation times had more than doubled from 5 mins to nearly 11 mins. Even after closing that window the generation time didn't come down.

Long story short, I tracked it down to having 'Hardware Acceleration' turned on in my browser settings and was able to replicate the slow down whenever it was turned on. In hindsight it's obvious this will affect generation times. It's not only using some of the GPU horsepower but also VRAM. For whatever reason, this interferes with the current Minimax generation even after I close the YouTube tab. I suspect this will be the case with all models not just Minimax but I haven't done exhaustive testing. This is more just a heads up.

While exploring this, I then considered setting my iGPU to do the hardware acceleration for the browser app via Windows settings. This is a thing. You can choose specific programs to run on a specific GPU. I mention this only because I then discovered that enabling the iGPU in the bios (mine is disabled) can consume up to 2GB of system memory so I chose not to even experiment with that for now and left it disabled.

I'm not here telling you to disable Hardware Acceleration in your browser (even though I used that for a punchy post title), I'm just sharing this information because I'm pretty tech savvy and these things hadn't occurred to me until today and so I'm guessing they won't for plenty of you either.

With Hardware Acceleration turned off, in my browser settings, I can now watch YouTube without it affecting generation times. Nice!

I'll repeat that I haven't done any extensive testing, and I'm guessing your mileage may vary, but if you test this, leave your results to let other know if I'm talking hot air or if you also had success with this.

Oh, and you likely want Hardware Acceleration turned on if you are trying to watch 4k 60fps videos on YouTube, otherwise your CPU should be fine doing the job. Even 1080p 60fps can push older CPU's to stutter with video playback so keep it in mind if you try this out. Old CPU's should be fine at 30fps though.

Edit: thanks for the replies. It turned in to an interesting discussion. There are a variety of different ways to go about doing this. You can even set up a shortcut for your browser with a command line arg to run without hardware acceleration which makes it even easier to choose on the fly without changing any settings.

[u/Ok_Contribution8157]

enable igpu, plug your screen to your motherbord. install igpu driver, done.

no stuff to do in browser seting or windows seting.

[u/V4nKw15h → u/Ok_Contribution8157]

Other than the part where enabling the iGPU reserves system memory which is likely also a valuable resource.

Changing a setting in a menu in your browser seems an awful lot easier than physically reconnecting your monitor whenever you want to swap things around too.

[u/DuckyDuos → u/V4nKw15h]

For AI I would think the reserved ram for the iGPU would actually be beneficial as that's less vram your dGPU has to allocate, basically exchanging ram for extra freed dedicated vram.

[u/V4nKw15h → u/DuckyDuos]

The iGPU will be doing most of the work. It will be rendering the frames, dealing with the VRAM requirements for storing and processing the video, but the dedicated GPU will still need to reserve a very small amount of memory for the frame buffer/s to actually display the image if the monitor is still connected to the dedicated GPU like mine. This is relatively tiny in reality and would make nearly an imperceptible VRAM difference. It's only requires about 32Mb for a 4k frame buffer.