GPU Encoding

mekelly wrote on 2/9/2010, 6:12 AM
I just got a new ATI Radeon 5750 video card to support dual flat panels under Windows 7.

Thought I'd see how much their ATI Stream technology would help encoding times versus Vegas Pro 9 (64 bit). I am running Windows 7 64 bit with 4GB RAM and a Pentium D930 processor overclocked to 3.6GHz.

I encoded a 3:26 .mt2 clip from my Canon HV20 camera to .mp4, the ipod 640x480 template. I used the standard template, no changes. It took 660 seconds (11 minutes) to render.

I then took the same clip and encoded it with Cyberlink Expresso (which uses the GPU in the Radeon card) and encoded it to 640x480 using their iphone template. It took 91 seconds to render.

Granted, we're not comparing EXACTLY the same thing but I was amazed at the fact that is was 7X faster!

I don't know if this would hold up against other formats, etc. and the Cyberlink product isn't Vegas, but wow. To me it demonstrates the raw power of these GPU processors and how well suited they are for the calculations involved in video encoding.

Thoughts?

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 2/9/2010, 1:24 PM
This has been discussed to death here on the forum, just search for "gpu" or "cuda."
Sebaz wrote on 2/9/2010, 2:37 PM
I don't know about CUDA but I have a Radeon HD4850 with 1 GB of RAM, and its accelerated graphics encoding is pathetic. Sure, it's superfast, but its quality is just deplorable. One consumer NLE that takes advantage of it and has it as an encoding option is Cyberlink Powerdirector, which is a pretty decent NLE. I did a comparison of the same four clips on a timeline encoded at 20 Mbps, except in Vegas which doesn't allow more than 16 Mbps. These are a AVCHD clips from a Canon HF100,

Vegas took 10:47, Premiere CS4 10:42 and Powerdirector with the ATI acceleration option took 3:01. So yes, timewise is excellent, but when I compared the results the quality of the ATI encoded file is abysmal. There is garbage all over the place, especially in moving parts. It's comparable to HD broadcast TV, looks fine (so to speak) when it's a static picture but as soon as things start moving it's a pixel mess. This is the same. The same timeline encoded also with Powerdirector but without the ATI option or the smart render produces a decent quality video.

If I knew that CUDA can produce a great quality picture with the same savings in time I would bite the bullet and buy an Nvidia card, but I spent quite a lot on the ATI some time ago. So I'd rather leave the timeline encoding all night long to decent quality rather than save time but get a horrible looking render.
John_Cline wrote on 2/9/2010, 2:58 PM
I have read and it has been my experience that the video quality of the encoding applications for nVidia's CUDA are better than those applications for the ATI cards.

I have the Badaboom encoder and it will not take any sort of high-quality AVI file as input, it only accepts MPEG-2, H.264/AVC, AVCHD, HDV, MPEG-1, WMV, VC-1, DivX, Xvid and FRAPS and it only encodes to H.264 to an MP4 container.
jabloomf1230 wrote on 2/9/2010, 3:19 PM
I also "fell" for the Badaboom encoder, when it first came out. It produces great H.264 and it is lightning fast on my nVidia 275 GTX. Unfortunately, it will only read the file formats you mentioned and also uncompressed AVI. Unfortunately, the company has promised a lot of upgrades and additional input formats, but has never delivered on any of this. And you would think that you could frame serve into it, but I've never been able to do so.
mekelly wrote on 2/9/2010, 7:03 PM
John,

Don't understand your point. Just about every thread has been discussed here before. I am not asking a question that's already been answered, I am making a simple point about the encoding times I got with and without a GPU.

If someone were to post to the HDV render test thread with their times, would you respond the same......

Just seems odd to me.
Laurence wrote on 2/9/2010, 7:30 PM
No doubt that the GPU renders are way faster, all the GPU external renderers I've tried work great in SD, but don't handle the HD codecs that I master in. Thus they are kind of useless so far. For SD though they work great. My favorite is Handbrake by the way. Free, nice GUI, fast render times, and great looking results. If it would only handle .mxf or Cineform compression I would use it on my HD projects as well.