I am trying to speed the production process in PD10, taking in account the following features:
- OpenCL to harness GPU power for greatly improved video effect speed;
- Hardware video encoder enabled.
I mention that I use a system with AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ and a GPU AMD Radeon 6850 (1G DDR5), so my computer supports hardware acceleration, since I have graphics card that supports AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing.
I am not able to see any improvement in the production speed. If I use the onboad graphic card or use the dedicated GPU card (AMD Radeon 6850) there is no difference, even that in the second case I see the "Hardware video encoder"enabled.
I processed a 3:50 minutes video, with 720p HD movies, some pictures, using transitions and some Pip objects in 4:30 minutes. The CPU Usage is 90% - 100% and the GPU usages varies between 0% - 10%, but most of the time is 0%.
In case I enable preview during production, I can see a 53% usage of GPU and 90% - 100% CPU usage.
So, in my case conclusions are:
- GPU doesn't accelerate the production process. I got the same time if I produce with a poor onboard GPU (ATI 3200) or if I produce with a middle range GPU AMD Radeon 6850;
- GPU does help, only if I "enable preview during production", but this thing doesn't decrease the producing time. Only helps to be able to preview the movie during the production.
- I suppose that only a better CPU, will increase the processing speed.
- It is possible that in some certain conditions (many transitions, and Pip obsjects), to see a resonable difference. If there are only a few Pip objects and few transitions, there are no difference with special GPU or without.
Special GPU means all these new sophisticated technology implemented in the latest GPU's:
- OpenGL® 4.1;
- AMD App Acceleration
- Avivo™ HD
- a.s.o.