Is it possible to use with no GPU?

[NukeninDark]

I found some code that only addresses AMD and NVIDIA GPUs but doesn't mention any options for using Video2x without graphics cards. I'm curious if it's possible to run Video2x on a system with just an Intel CPU.

I have a mini server equipped with an Intel processor (N200). I understand that using my primary computer would yield faster rendering times. However, for my purposes, it would be more convenient to leave the rendering to the mini server, even if it takes several days.

If using Video2x without a dedicated GPU is currently unsupported, do you think it might be possible in the future? Are there any plans to enable it?

[k4yt3x]

It is technically supported. What Video2X absolutely needs is Vulkan support. N200 seems to support Vulkan, so it should run. In a scenario where you only have the CPU, it's also possible to do software-only rendering with something like vulkan-swrast. One caveat is that Anime4K seems to hate swrast now for some reason.

You could definitely give it a try. Since your integrated GPU seems to support Vulkan, I think it might just work out of the box. If not just ping me again here.

[NukeninDark]

It worked! Here's the command I used:
sudo docker run -it --rm -v $PWD/data:/host ghcr.io/k4yt3x/video2x:latest -i standard-test.mp4 -o output.mp4 -f realesrgan -r 4 -m realesr-animevideov3

I had to remove the --GPU flag for this to work. It's slow, but that's expected. I think this possibility should be mentioned in the documentation for users like me who want to utilize a home server instead of their main computer.

[k4yt3x]

Are you seeing llvmpipe as the device? If so that's using software rendering, and it could potentially be faster by using your Intel iGPU. Try passing through your GPU via --device /dev/dri maybe?

[NukeninDark]

My server is currently undergoing maintenance, so I used my personal PC to run this test (i7-11800H). Running without GPU was painfully slow; in 30 seconds, it only processed 6 frames. However, when using the iGPU, it processed 41-58 frames. Using the "--gpu all" flag was the same as using "--device /dev/dri".

I would also like to point out that using the --privileged flag sometimes resulted in faster processing times, with 46-58 frames. I monitored the resource usage, and it was under 2% of my CPU capacity, suggesting that there is potential for much faster performance. There are definitely many areas for improvement in this field.

[k4yt3x]

Thanks for the info, perhaps I should add an Intel section.