Intel Support

AI Accelerator	Support Level	CPU Architecture	Operating System	API/driver version
Intel CPU	Full support	x86_64	Ubuntu 22+ and Windows	-
Intel GPU	Experimental	x86_64	Ubuntu 22+ and Windows	-
Intel NPU	Experimental	x86_64	Ubuntu 22+ only	-

To use OpenVINO runtimes, you have the option select it on plugin install for compatible hardware. If you want to preselect GPU or NPU runtimes, make sure you have the latest Intel drivers installed on your machine.

Hardware requirements

The list of Intel CPU and GPU models that can be used to perform AI inference are available here. Please check out the tables to learn if you setup is compatible.

Software requirements

For Ubuntu

For the Intel drivers, follow: - For GPU: https://github.com/intel/compute-runtime/releases/tag/25.09.32961.5 - For NPU: https://github.com/intel/linux-npu-driver/releases/tag/v1.16.0

Also make sure you have the latest libtbb installed:

sudo apt install libtbb12 ocl-icd-libopencl1

Add the user to video and render groups:

sudo usermod -aG video $USER
sudo usermod -aG render $USER

If, for some reason, your Ubuntu or Debian version tends to overwrite some of the packages installed above, you can prevent APT from upgrading them by placing the relevant packages on hold, for instance:

sudo apt-mark hold intel-ocloc intel-opencl-icd libigdgmm12 libze-intel-gpu1

For Windows

To make use of the Intel GPU, make sure to install the Intel Graphics Driver as shown on this page.

Configuration

By default, the OpenVINO runtime performs model inference on CPU.

To run a model on a compatible Intel GPU, you need to specify that in a JSON file located in /opt/networkoptix-metavms/mediaserver/var/nx_ai_manager/nxai_manager/bin/runtime_args.json :

{
  "device_type": "GPU"
}

Similarly, to use the Intel NPU, the JSON file should contain:

{
  "device_type": "NPU"
}

After making the changes, please restart the Nx Server as detailed in this section: Restarting the server.

Verifying the runtime is available

After installing the Intel drivers and restarting Nx Server, the Intel runtime appears in the Nx AI Manager plugin's runtime selection panel. Open any camera's settings, go to the Integrations tab, click Nx AI Manager, and confirm that the Intel runtime entry is visible.

The Intel runtime appears in the list once the OpenVINO drivers are installed and the server has been restarted

Monitoring

On Ubuntu

You can monitor the usage of Intel CPU, GPU and NPU by using the adequate command:

Hardware	Command	How to install
CPU	top	Comes preinstalled in the OS
GPU	sudo intel_gpu_top	sudo apt install intel-gpu-tools
NPU	intel-npu-top	https://pypi.org/project/intel-npu-top/

Notes

Incompatible models

Not all models running on CPU are supported by the GPU and NPU, in such case, the Nx AI Manager will fail to run and display an error message. For example, the face detection model works on CPU and GPU but not on NPU. Please reach out to the support team to advise if there is a workaround in such situations.