Quote:
AVT support seems to have even more promise. AMD demonstrated a pc encoding four HD video streams to h.264 in real time. Compare that with a top of the range Intel Quad taking ten hours for a single stream, and you can see the potential benefit.

My Quad core isn't real time but encodes a 9 min video clip (HD 1080 Mepg2) to AVCHD 1440 in 15 mins. (see next post)

Quote: is it only "effects" that renders faster? If i for example have my avchd files and wants to add music, is there any rendering gain with CUDA or ATI´s patch? I realy want an answer...
/Andreas

OK Andreas: here are some brief tests for you.

My specs: Core2Quad 9550 2.83 GHz 3.2 GB RAM, XP SP3, 8600GT 1024Mb

Encode 9 mins Mpeg2 1080 to AVCHD 1440 render time 15mins. No change with or without CUDA

Encode 3 mins AVCHD 1080 Colour Painting video effect overlayed on entire 3 mins: CUDA on = 30mins, CUDA off = 7mins.

Yep that's right : 4 times longer with CUDA activated!!!!!

Processor utilisation for the above Colour Painting test : CUDA on = 30%, CUDA off = 100% (all 4 cores equal)

PS I have some screen shots but they won't attach : just get a blank web page. Any tricks?

100kb max on the screenshots.

Dafydd

Hello to everyone in the forum !

I have been dealing with the GPU assisted transcoding issue since last June very thoroughly !

There are some things that need clarification and I will try to do it for you !

PowerDirector's current GPU assistance provided by NVIDIA CUDA DOES NOT involve transcoding AT ALL !!

It is all in the filtering/rendering area and currently the ONLY tool to provide NVIDIA GPU assisted transcoding is Badaboomit !

On the other hand, ATI is going to provide GPU assisted transcoding using ATI Stream technology as officialy presented on November 13th. See more at: http://ati.amd.com/technology/streamcomputing/index.html

Furthermore, RADEON 4800 series has BUILT IN HARDWARE TRANSCODING for H.264 and MPEG-2 formats. You can see details at:
http://ati.amd.com/products/firepro/Siggraph_2008_video_encode_final.pdf

It is obvious from all above that ATI's transcoding solution is supported BOTH in software and hardware level. That means that using a 4800 RADEON series card one can achieve VERY FAST transcoding speed regardless of the CPU installed.

The crucial issue is that noone needs to upgrade the whole system; JUST the graphics card will be enough !!

can someone from Cyberlink confirm Nikolaos message? If that is true that i with my old Opteron 165 @2.35ghz and 2Gb ram can get good editing (rendering) improvments. I quote

"The crucial issue is that noone needs to upgrade the whole system; JUST the graphics card will be enough !! "

Andreas,

I don't think CyberLink needs to. There is no quotable test data that can be repeated (you yourself can confirm) from the post by Nikolaos.

Dafydd

I´m interested in buying there software if and a ATI-4800series card IF the software and there patch is going to get me a significant performance gain when rendering my avchd-files, so I don’t see why it shouldn´t be in there interest to tell me and others what to expect with there ATI-patch…

/Andreas

Andreas,

I've drawn your attention to the FAQ's released by CyberLink Customer Support. If you wish to continue to seek additional information beyond the release then you should place your enquiry with CyberLink Customer Support online services. http://www.cyberlink.com/prog/support/cs/index.do
The answer you seek wont be found on this forum beyond what I've already posted. I don't want you to be misled by speculative postings or inaccurate third party information.

This is a forum for CyberLink members to discuss and share their users' experience. CyberLink customer support will not reply in the forum regarding the technical issues. Topics or replies with attacking or illegal messages will be deleted by the forum management directly.

Dafydd
[Moderator]

Hi Andreas

maybe you should just hang in there until Q1 2009 when, hopefully, Cyberlink will announce the ATI patch, and with luck that will have more functionality than the current CUDA patch.

I think the fact of the matter is that it's still early days for gpu encoding, even though the technology has existed for a while.

It's interesting to consider an AVCHD camcorder. The onboard image processor has to encode the video to AVCHD "on the fly" - and clearly there isn't the room or power available for it to use a Q6600 or even a QX9770. Besides which, neither of those processors would manage to do the encoding quickly enough anyway.

So, using a dedicated hardware encoder, the camcorder can do the task using much less power and with a far simpler and smaller processor. I suspect there is a certain amount of parallel processing used, though the manufacturers never seem to release much in the way of technical details.

When you compare the performance of the current generation of AVCHD camcorders with the previous ones, it's also clear that important developments and advances in image processing technology are being made - and still need to be made. That will hopefully reduce motion artefacts, for example.

Returning to encoding on a pc, when you consider the potential speed gains, there just has to be an increasing head of steam pressing for development, and the first software to feature proper implementation of GPU encoding will have a huge advantage over all the others. The encouraging thing is that thus far, Cyberlink seem to be ahead of the mainstream pack.

I think many people don't appreciate the scale of the speed gains possible. Whilst you might reduce your encoding time by a factor of maybe two or even three by opting for a very expensive top of the line cpu, the potential is for a tenfold or more speed gain simply by using a mid range gpu.

It's entirely possible that some owners of Extreme Edition processors will be mightily peeved if a "lesser" pc equipped with a relatively low-priced video card can encode video at many times the speed of their own system.

I'm all about "bang for your buck" myself, so I'm as anxious as you to see what Cyberlink can do with ATI AVT support, and hope that AMD work with them to bring it about.

Quote:
When you compare the performance of the current generation of AVCHD camcorders with the previous ones, it's also clear that important developments and advances in image processing technology are being made - and still need to be made. That will hopefully reduce motion artefacts, for example.

What irks me is that often the improvements are firmware related, not hardware yet the consumer industry has little interest in providing support for existing/older models to upgrade their performance.