Comments

john_dennis wrote on 3/19/2016, 3:22 PM
For all the folklore about it, the Pony Express only lasted about 18 months. GPU acceleration may be just as transitory.

PS
I live within a few hundred feet of a 13 Mile House and used to drink at a 12 Mile House.
John_Cline wrote on 3/19/2016, 3:48 PM
I've been saying this for years after reading a long post by the developer of VirtualDub saying that GPU encoding isn't the panacea everyone assumes it will be. All of the GPU-accelerated encoders I've tried so far produce lower quality results than just CPU encoding by itself. As far as I'm concerned, currently there is no substitute for tight code and a fast CPU.
NormanPCN wrote on 3/19/2016, 4:48 PM
GPUs are slower than CPUs. The advantage they have is massive parallelization. Only task that fit the massive parallel mold can really benefit from GPU use. Encoding a file to things like AVC and such is not terribly parallel. You can force the massive parallel issue, putting a square peg into a round hole, but that introduces compromises which typically affect quality.

Here is a link I've posted here before from a lead x264 developer about issues with GPU use and file encoding.


GPU accel is absolutely ideal for things like video effects, masks and compositing. These are inherently parallel tasks with little or no need for thread synchronization. Using GPU for this is a no brainer win.
PeterDuke wrote on 3/19/2016, 7:15 PM
Our brain elements are not terribly fast but massively parallel. There is the promise if we can only reverse engineer the brain. The trouble is that we focus on certain parts of a scene in fine detail or the whole scene in a general way, but the whole scene has to be available in fine detail because there is no way of anticipating what detail we want to look at next.

What happened to Artificial Neural Networks? I haven't heard people talking about them for some years.
Laurence wrote on 3/20/2016, 11:22 PM
I see the quality hit with GPU rendering in Vegas. I'm not seeing it in Resolve 12 however. Is Vegas doing something different?
musicvid10 wrote on 3/21/2016, 9:41 AM
Anything that sacrifices render quality for any speed gain would be just a seldom-used, emergency tool in my production workflow.



Laurence wrote on 3/21/2016, 10:35 AM
The thing is, I only see the GPU quality hit in Vegas.
musicvid10 wrote on 3/21/2016, 11:04 AM
Resolve must be using a better dll.
NickHope wrote on 3/21/2016, 1:27 PM
Do you actually have a choice to render without GPU in Resolve?
Former user wrote on 3/21/2016, 2:05 PM
The original Resolve software/hardware was build around the PNY GTX-470 video card. They used about 10 or so in the case for rendering. They were not used as video display cards, but as processors.

(the company I used to work for serviced them so we had bunches of these cards)
Laurence wrote on 3/22/2016, 12:28 AM
(i)>Do you actually have a choice to render without GPU in Resolve?(/i)

No, but the render quality from Resolve with the GPU looks the same as Vegas without it. I don't see that hit in quality that Vegas is getting when I engage the GPU during render. l think it's pretty much a non-issue outside of the Vegas platform.
Laurence wrote on 3/22/2016, 12:31 AM
Actually, I take that back. I've seen some GPU renders from some conversion utilities that looked terrible.

Has anyone experienced a loss in quality from GPU renders in Premier, Avid, or Resolve?