Quote: Today nVidia launched the new GTX960. They finally completed the hardware associated with HEVC decoding and encoding.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-960,4038.html

H.265 (HEVC) Video Decoding Engine
One advantage the GM206 GPU holds over GM204 is its new video engine. While the GeForce GTX 970 and 980 support H.265 (HEVC) video encoding, only the GeForce GTX 960 decodes this forward-looking format. The GeForce GTX 960 promises to be an excellent choice for home theater PCs with the ability to play back 4K video at low power, and natively supporting HDCP 2.2 content over HDMI 2.0.

I am curious of the level of support that CyberLink will provide for this little gem.

Hi SoNic67 ,
You have posed an interesting question for CL to answer. I have passed on your inquiry to CyberLink and await a reply.
Dafydd

FWIW

My 4 year old i7 920 PC with a $ 60 GT 640 GPU card will output HDMI 4K HEVC flawlessly albeit at 30FPS. A reminder that BR HD is only 24FPS. And literally all available 4K HEVC material is 25/30 FPS.

Decoding is of course done by the CPU, usage average with 4K HEVC is 45% ( less with 4K 264) using the free GOM player.

For the price of the GTX 970 alone you can buy the whole above setup.

Eugene 73s, WA6JZN ex DL9GC
CYBERLINK PLEASE ADD UHD BLU RAY BURNING SOFTWARE
PD14,
Win10,64bit.CPU i7 6700,16GB ,C= 480 GB SSD ,GPU GTX1060 6GB 1 fan. Plus 3 int, 4 ext HDD's for video etc.LG WH16NS40 reads UHD.
4K 24" ViewSonic monitor.Camera Sony FDR-A

I was talking about the GTX960 that just launched at $200 (it will go down in a short time). And while you can say your PC "plays" the video from your camera, editing it is a different thing.
Scrubbing trough a 4K video with CPU usage at 45% doesn't leave much more room for other actions.

I just sold my HD7970 on ebay today and intend to get one of those new cards.

SoNice.
I am not going to hold my breath, if that is what you mean about CL going to
do SOMETHING about...
I've learned my lesson.

isn't the GTX 960 a neutered Maxwell 2???
decode and encode H.265 HEVC, hmmm that isn't bad at all.
introductory MSRP isn't bad and what happened to TI at the end???
is that a sign for charging us more money for two letters in the English alphabet later???

Are you going to OC yours? 'no bridge too far'

Yashica Electro 8 LD-6 Super 8mm
Asrock TaiChi X470, AMD R7 2700X, W7P 64, MSI GTX1060 6GB, Corsair 16GB/RAM
Dell XPS L702X i7-2860QM, W7P / W10P 64, Intel HD3000/nVidia GT 550M 1GB, Micron 16GB/RAM
Samsung Galaxy Note3/NX1

Yes, basically it is 1/2 of GTX980. But they updated the hardware decoder past what it is in 980. And they have the same hardware encoder like in 970/980, an upgrade from 950 and that is an upgrade from Kepler cards.

For strictly gaming it might not be the best buy possible (compared with ATI offerings), but for the video editing (what I care) it is very promising.
And, even for gaming, since it costs only $200 and the 980 costs some $550, I think that two of those in SLI are a better buy than the 980.
Of course, the memory is only 2GB, but that is sufficient for us.

Now we are getting somewhere. The feature set on the GTX 960 is great for a home theater PC. A bit expensive at $200 though. Hopefully it will drop.

HDMI 2.0 / HDCP 2.2 cards are not exactly plenty. Much less cards with hardware HEVC encoders/decoders.

My guess is that it will be a while until the software stack works properly with nVidia drivers + PD + HEVC encoding/decoding.

Dafydd, when is PD14 due
MSI X99A Raider
Intel i7-5820k @ 4.4 GHz
32GB DDR4 RAM
Gigabyte nVidia GTX 960 4GB
480 GB Patriot Ignite SSD (boot)
2 x 480 GB Sandisk Ultra II SSD (striped)
6 x 1 TB Samsung 860 SSD (striped)

2 x LG 32UD59-B 32" 4K
Asus PB238 23" HD (portrait)

2015 I would guess!

Quote: Now we are getting somewhere. The feature set on the GTX 960 is great for a home theater PC. A bit expensive at $200 though. Hopefully it will drop.

Well, I sold my HD7970 and with some extra money I bought the GTX960. On newegg.com, I used "Visa Checkout" and I had $25 discount. Plus EVGA (that's what I got) is running a $10 off coupon right now (basically paid for shipping).

Quote:

Quote: Now we are getting somewhere. The feature set on the GTX 960 is great for a home theater PC. A bit expensive at $200 though. Hopefully it will drop.

Well, I sold my HD7970 and with some extra money I bought the GTX960. On newegg.com, I used "Visa Checkout" and I had $25 discount. Plus EVGA (that's what I got) is running a $10 off coupon right now (basically paid for shipping).

Nice. I used Visa checkout with newegg before already, so that discount is out for me.
Also, I have two HTPCs to upgrade so I think I will wait a little bit longer for the GTX 960 price to drop. It was just released so I'm hopeful that it will be lower 6 months later.

Anyway, the other HTPC components will need to be upgraded too. The HDMI 2.0 enables 4K and that is my main interest in it.
I don't know if there are AV receivers that do HDMI 2.0 / HDCP 2.2 yet . And of course the TVs . One HTPC has a projector, and I haven't seen any UHD/4K projector under $10,000. Needless to say that isn't in my budget. The other HTPC has a regular LCD TV.
4K TVs are still pricey though I haven't really paid attention to the price - the 8 year old full HD projector is the one I want to upgrade, but I'm not going to pay $10,000 - the last one was $1,500.
MSI X99A Raider
Intel i7-5820k @ 4.4 GHz
32GB DDR4 RAM
Gigabyte nVidia GTX 960 4GB
480 GB Patriot Ignite SSD (boot)
2 x 480 GB Sandisk Ultra II SSD (striped)
6 x 1 TB Samsung 860 SSD (striped)

2 x LG 32UD59-B 32" 4K
Asus PB238 23" HD (portrait)

I think CL needs to use the latest video codec SDK 5.0 beta (Dec 22, 2014) from nVidia to recompile the encoder part:

https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-video-codec-sdk

What’s New in NVENC SDK 5.0
Compared to NVENC SDK 4.0, NVENC SDK 5.0 adds following new features.
• Support for HEVC (H.265) encoding on GM20x GPUs (GTX980 and future Quadro/Tesla/GRID platforms based on GM20x GPUs)
• Various quality and performance improvements in encoding

Not sure if that's enough or if nVidia needs to update their part too...

Just an update. I have chased up to see if I can get an answer.
Dafydd

Good morning!

My computer, a 4 year old i7 920, 12GB has a PCIE 2 bus. Newer computers have PCIE 3. I too would like to have a HDMI 2 card in the future, but they would all be PCIE 3 or even higher by now.

What would be the estimated loss in performance, I assume they are backward compatible.

At the moment I use a very cheap GT640 card that provides 4K HDMI 1.4 output. It is a 3 card running on a 2 bus yet the 4K output, including 4K HEVC is flawless, so it appears that for this specific setup at least, the performance reduction seems negligible.

With 4K MP4 playback the CPU is at app. 30% and the GPU at about 20%

What is the most important parameter that controls playback, cuda core number, memory, clock speed ? What is second ? What do I look for when buying a better GPU card?

Since most 4K available now (including my camcorder) is at 30 FPS or even less, it is not a major issue at this time but HDMI 2, 60 FPS capable, would be a very nice thing to have.

Eugene 73s, WA6JZN ex DL9GC
CYBERLINK PLEASE ADD UHD BLU RAY BURNING SOFTWARE
PD14,
Win10,64bit.CPU i7 6700,16GB ,C= 480 GB SSD ,GPU GTX1060 6GB 1 fan. Plus 3 int, 4 ext HDD's for video etc.LG WH16NS40 reads UHD.
4K 24" ViewSonic monitor.Camera Sony FDR-A

Quote: Just an update. I have chased up to see if I can get an answer.
Dafydd

Thanks!
If they did, PD it would be probably the first NLE to support this. In my experience CL are better than most NLE competitors in this matter (updates).

Eugene, I didn't get the 960 because an older Kepler card like your won't work. I am just looking to drop that CPU utilization down to single digits because the more "room" is left in CPU usage, the faster the rest of edits will go (effects, transitions).

$200 looks not too bad. Looked at the specs and 4K at 60 FPS will not work unless two are used.


Do you have any thoughts on the questions?

What is the most important parameter that controls playback, cuda core number, memory, clock speed ? What is second ? What do I look for when buying a better GPU card?

And running a 3 card in a PCIE 2 system?

Thanks

Eugene 73s, WA6JZN ex DL9GC
CYBERLINK PLEASE ADD UHD BLU RAY BURNING SOFTWARE
PD14,
Win10,64bit.CPU i7 6700,16GB ,C= 480 GB SSD ,GPU GTX1060 6GB 1 fan. Plus 3 int, 4 ext HDD's for video etc.LG WH16NS40 reads UHD.
4K 24" ViewSonic monitor.Camera Sony FDR-A

Eugen, I did some tests and it seems that memory is not used past 4GB, HDD is not very important (used even a RAM disc and didn't gain too much speed-up), GPU acceleration is limited (for example at to 30-40% for a powerful GPU), CPU makes most of the difference at some point, but even that seems to have a bottleneck in 4K editing.

Quote: $200 looks not too bad. Looked at the specs and 4K at 60 FPS will not work unless two are used.

What makes you think that ?
The GTX 960 supports DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 2.0 and should work fine at 4K at 60 fps.

What is the most important parameter that controls playback, cuda core number, memory, clock speed ? What is second ? What do I look for when buying a better GPU card?

If you are talking about realtime playback/decoding, I think most cards will perform the same as long as they are capable of decoding the format you want, and the software stack is capable of using it.
If you are talking about higher-speed decoding during renderings, I'm not sure, you may just have to try it.

And running a 3 card in a PCIE 2 system?

That will work fine, but at PCIE2 speed of course.
MSI X99A Raider
Intel i7-5820k @ 4.4 GHz
32GB DDR4 RAM
Gigabyte nVidia GTX 960 4GB
480 GB Patriot Ignite SSD (boot)
2 x 480 GB Sandisk Ultra II SSD (striped)
6 x 1 TB Samsung 860 SSD (striped)

2 x LG 32UD59-B 32" 4K
Asus PB238 23" HD (portrait)

Thank you both for the answers.

Since this card looks so promising I read some of the reviews and some of them indicate that 4K might be pushing it, if I read that correctly. The max resolution spec is about the same as the GT640.




Quote:That will work fine, but at PCIE2 speed of course.

I found this interesting reading:


http://www.enthusiastpc.net/articles/00003/3.aspx


That would be 8GB/sec only versus 16 GB for PCIE 3. That ought to be more than fast enough.




Thank you , Sonice for bringing this card to my attention, I am looking forward to hear how well it works. I assume you have PCIE3 ?

Eugene
73s, WA6JZN ex DL9GC
CYBERLINK PLEASE ADD UHD BLU RAY BURNING SOFTWARE
PD14,
Win10,64bit.CPU i7 6700,16GB ,C= 480 GB SSD ,GPU GTX1060 6GB 1 fan. Plus 3 int, 4 ext HDD's for video etc.LG WH16NS40 reads UHD.
4K 24" ViewSonic monitor.Camera Sony FDR-A

Quote: Thank you both for the answers.

Since this card looks so promising I read some of the reviews and some of them indicate that 4K might be pushing it, if I read that correctly. The max resolution spec is about the same as the GT640.

The max resolution on the GT640 is 4096x2160, ie. 4K, but that will be only at 30fps since that card only supports HDMI 1.x .
The max resolution on the GTX 960 is is 5120x3200 - not "about the same" as the GT 640, but much higher. That's when using dual DisplayPort connectors, also. I'm not aware of any 5120x3200 displays yet, though. One can only hope

I found this interesting reading:


http://www.enthusiastpc.net/articles/00003/3.aspx


That would be 8GB/sec only versus 16 GB for PCIE 3. That ought to be more than fast enough.

Yes. But I am not sure under what circumstances the higher PCIE3 speed will make a difference.
4096x2160x3x60 amounts to 1.48 GB/s . That means even a PCIE1 bus has enough bandwidth for encoding 4K in realtime.
The bus would only become a bottleneck if the encoder on the card is capable of higher encoding speeds.
At PCIE2 you have 8GB/s which would allow for 5x encoding . I don't think the hardware encoder really goes that fast.
Even if it does, you are likely be limited by other things than the bus, like the speed of effect processing in the software.

For decoding, it works in reverse. There is no issue with sending compressed data over PCIE, since it's relatively small. The bottleneck may be sending the decoded data from the video card back to the host. At that point you may be limited by the PCIE bus, ie. limited to 5x decoding.

I have rarely seen projects encode at faster than 2x speeds. And those would be HD projects. 4K projects usually take much longer - they encode at less than 1x - the bottleneck is probably my 750Ti card's encoding speed, not the PCIE bus speed.
And that's with H.264, not HEVC .
MSI X99A Raider
Intel i7-5820k @ 4.4 GHz
32GB DDR4 RAM
Gigabyte nVidia GTX 960 4GB
480 GB Patriot Ignite SSD (boot)
2 x 480 GB Sandisk Ultra II SSD (striped)
6 x 1 TB Samsung 860 SSD (striped)

2 x LG 32UD59-B 32" 4K
Asus PB238 23" HD (portrait)

Quote: Since this card looks so promising I read some of the reviews and some of them indicate that 4K might be pushing it, if I read that correctly.

I think you read about playing a 3D game at 4K, that's different part of the chip. The hardware encoder and decoder that Kepler and Maxwell have are separate bits inside of the chip, those don't use the computing cores.