• Video Encoding Using Your Graphics Card

    Video Encoding Using Your Graphics Card

    Roydon Cerejo, Aug 31, 2009 1800 hrs IST

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Graphics cards have predominantly been used for gaming since that's their sole purpose in a system. The only reason you would make this investment is to play 3D games with all the bells and whistles turned on, something an on board card can never do.




The idea of using the GPU for other purposes has been toyed with for quite sometime now. Nvidia went all out with their GPGPU applications a couple years ago when they announced their CUDA development platform. With that we also saw PhysX, which used the graphics card for physics calculations instead of the CPU. Badaboom, which is a video encoding application, uses the Nvidia graphics card to accelerate the encoding process.


This year we had ATI follow suit with their Stream technology that enabled users to use their 4xxx series graphics cards to quicken the encoding process, which ATI unlocked in their 8.12 Catalyst driver suite. But behind all the competition between the two companies, they had a common message - you no longer needed a faster CPU for a speedier encoding process. This meant it doesn't matter whether you have a quad core or a dual core anymore, as the graphics card is supposed to do all the work leaving your CPU free for other tasks.


Well, today we are going to verify if the GPU does indeed help boost encoding performance and also if using a dual core CPU or a quad core CPU makes any difference. In order to keep the results fair we needed a converter that supports both ATI and Nvidia, and currently we have just one application that can do it, Cyberlink's MediaShow Espresso video converter. The beauty of this one is that it supports Nvidia and ATI cards and you can even turn off the acceleration so that it uses the CPU. So let's assemble our test systems and see what kind of results we get.


 





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Discussion Board
(4) Comments
Sukhoi
,San Jose, on Dec 16, 2009 07:29 PM
For either high end Gaming or Digital production, build with Intel Core i5-750 based work horse, it's gonna be a rock solid workstation. Make sure to buy Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4P MOBO (future proof with USB3.0, SATA3.0 and 3xUSB speed) and 1 Sapphire ATI RADEON 1 GB DDR5 Juniper XT card. DDR3-1333 4 GB Dual Channel is more than sufficient! I can guarantee at least 5 year life time, am sure you guys won't regret it :)
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Anonymous
,Delhi, on Sep 01, 2009 10:23 AM
The good thing is that entry level GPUs (9600GT, HD4670) performed better than a high end CPU(i7 940). It will good to see the performance of high end card from both companies, I think the difference will be considerable.
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Tarun
,Mandi, HP, on Sep 01, 2009 12:53 AM
Mediashow Espresso sucks.. you could've used Badaboom for NVIDIA and the built in AVIVO Video converter.. look at the file size that Mediashow creates.. i transcoded a 700 MB movie to for my iPod Touch and the size was 1.2 GB... there is not control over the bitrate in Mediashow espresso..
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Jayesh Limaye
,Tech Labs, on Sep 01, 2009 09:12 AM
With all due respect, I must say that the reviewer did the right thing by using Mediashow Espresso. The aim of this article is not about which encoder is better. The reason is that it supports both NVIDIA CUDA and ATI Stream Processing. Badaboom supports only NVIDIA CUDA, while AVIVO converter supports only ATI Stream. Using two different encoder software would not be the right way to compare both, but using the same encoder sets a level playing field. Therefore, in the interest of fairness, we have used Cyberlink Mediashow Espresso.
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