Also I have an i7 processor with 6GB of ram...

Kevin, I feel your pain. This has been a nightmare when it comes to ATI and the Gpu transcoding issue. How many times have you heard "this time it's gonna work" yeah right. I'll have a heart attack if it ever does. I talked many people into buying and ATI card for this reason alone along with PD7. I've lost most of those friends LOL. Please Cyberlink. It's time for a real fix for this. P.S kevin, it doesn't work on my bro in laws pc either. GPU is just greyed out.

I have the same problem as Kevin. Radeon 4870, latest Catalyst drivers, and the "Enable GPU hardware video encoder" checkbox is grayed out.

Ahh, now I discovered my problem. I was trying to output "AVC .mpeg4", but the checkbox is only available for "Portable .mpeg4" and ".mpeg2". Let's see how it goes...

Okay, time for some quick tests:

CPU: Core2Duo E8400 (3.0 GHz)
GPU: Radeon 4870

Test 1:
starting file: AVCHD format (1920x1080 .MTS) 2min 15s length
converted file: PSP High Quality (320x240 AVC .MP4)
encoding time with GPU encoding: 00:01:43
encoding time without GPU encoding: 00:01:55
conclusion: Only 10% decrease in encoding time. Maybe not a huge difference here because it's already h.264 to start with?

Test 2:
starting file: AVCHD format (1920x1080 .MTS) 2min 15s length
converted file: BD MPEG-2 (1920x1080 .MPG)
encoding time with GPU encoding: 00:01:47
encoding time without GPU encoding: 00:03:11
conclusion: Nice! Nearly cut the encoding time in half!

Test 3:
starting file: BD MPEG-2 (1920x1080 .MPG, the output file from Test2) 2min 15s length
converted file: PSP High Quality (320x240 AVC .MP4)
encoding time with GPU encoding: 00:01:11
encoding time without GPU encoding: 00:01:18
conclusion: Only 9% decrease in encoding time. Looks like my hypothesis from Test1 is incorrect.

Overall: According to these limited tests, for my CPU and GPU, the improvement in Mpeg2 encoding is dramatic, but the improvement in h.264 encoding is very disappointing. Also, as a slightly off-topic issue, I wish PD7 had more options for h.264 .MP4 container encoding (larger or customizable video sizes).

EDIT: Hmm, just noticed a weird consequence, too. The file size of the clip from Test2 with GPU encoding enabled is 276 Mb, while the file size of the clip with GPU encoding disabled is 410 Mb. Both clips play just fine, and appear to be of similar quality.

I was pretty sure I tried to output an MPEG2 as well, but still didn't see the checkbox, but I will reboot the PC tonight and try a variety of different outputs and show them all here. Hopefully I will see the checkbox appear. I'll let everyone know soon!

Thanks!
Kevin

Wunch,

What about the image quality. Are there additional artifacts which appear after using the GPU encoding? I found with CUDA as well as with regular CPU the MPEG4 quality is not very good.

From what you are saying, ATI Stream encoding can also produce MPEG2 files. Am I reading this correctly? As of now CUDA can only do MPEG4 (h.264).

Q9300 2.5 GHz
4 GB Ram
Nvidia 9800 GT

Wunch, can you let us know what operating system (Vista 32 or Vista 64) you're using along with the Catalyst Version and whether or not you have Avivo installed or not. Also, did you check CCC to see if your gpu is active?

Image quality seems fine to me. I don't think I have a particularly discerning eye, but I didn't notice any artifacts.

I'm using Vista 32, Catalyst 8.12, and yes I have Avivo installed. I didn't monitor it the first time through, but I went back and repeated some of the tests while watching the ATI Overdrive page in CCC (The GPU activity monitor).

In Test1: GPU activity was basically 0% the whole time.

In Test2: GPU activity intermittently jumped up to above 10%, but also still around 0% most of the time. At one point it jumped up to 28% for just a second, then back to 0%.

In Test3: GPU activity lingered at around 2% for most of the time.

In all tests both cores of the CPU were near 100% load. Part of the explanation of the low GPU load is that I have a fairly powerful card, but according to what I've read from tests of ATI's own Avivo Video Converter, others get the same results: only intermittent and low GPU utilizations. I think it's clear that this implementation of GPU encoding is not anywhere near its potential. To be honest, I'm not really sure it's even working fully, given the weird file-size discrepancy in mpeg2 encoding.

Just found the following interesting article:
http://en.expreview.com/2009/01/15/review-ati-avivo-video-converter-works-based-on-cpu-not-gpu.html/1

My take is that there is something funny going on, and it most likely is not on Cyberlink's end, but ATI's.

Quote: Just found the following interesting article:
http://en.expreview.com/2009/01/15/review-ati-avivo-video-converter-works-based-on-cpu-not-gpu.html/1

My take is that there is something funny going on, and it most likely is not on Cyberlink's end, but ATI's.

Interesting article. Looks like the smoke and mirrors have been exposed. Win8 64-bit Pro Retail
Intel i7-4770
16GB DDR3 1600 8-8-8-24
MSI Z87-G45 Motherboard
ASUS GTX 660 Direct CU II OC 2GB GPU
1 TB RAID 1 (mirrored) Drive Array
Several scratch drives for video, TMP, pagefile.

Wunch, thanks for the update and the answers. You pretty much nailed exactly what was going on here with our test. This is for sure nothing like transcoding 4 HD videos in about an hour as was somewhat claimed earlier last year. Maybe you have to work for Ati or Cyberlink to get that kind of performance. No offense to either company but I think this is truly sad.

I finally got a chance to reboot my machine and see if the GPU checkbox is enabled or not. It will isn't, so I'm going to try and completely uninstall Cyberlink powerdirector, and reinstall it to see if that makes a difference somehow. Also, I did notice one machine difference. I am running Vista 64 bit. I'm wondering if that's what it is?

Kevin

Kevin, I don't know if you got it working or not but this is what I did for it to, I guess..work. Avivo video converter had to be installed on my pc for the checkbox to be enabled.. Also, I had to turn off the preview for it to actually encode. I'm also using Vista x64. I basically did what Wunch had posted.

Kevin,
Do you fix the probem? Because I have the same here. Vista 64, PD 2519, ATI Radeon 4850 card, latest ATI drivers,"Enable GPU hardware video encoder" checkbox is grayed out.

Quote: I have a 64 bit vista operating system with an ATI Radeon 4850 card.
I followed the following steps today:

1) Downloaded the latest 2519 patch
2) Installed the patch.
3) Opened up PowerDirector and went to Edit --> Preferences -->Editing menu. The GPU box is still greyed out and non selectable.
4) I then downloaded the latest ATI graphics drivers, installed them and rebooted.
5) I ran powerdirector again and still the checkbox is greyed out.
6) I then reinstalled the update patch again, just in case my updating of the drivers caused some type of issue.
7) Ran PowerDirector again, and still the checkbox is not enabled.

When I drop a video in and goto produce - create a file - mpeg2 and next the GPU is disabled.

How can I enable the checkbox to get full GPU functionality?

Kevin

Saul, Once I installed Avivo Converter, everything was fine. It didn't work with all the steps you've taken as I did the same things you did. When I installed Avivo converter, all was well. Also,you can only enable GPU when converting to Mpeg2 and, I had to disable the preview for it to work. Hope this helps.

Thanks chad,
But at this moment Avivo not is available for Vista 64.

Quote: Saul, Once I installed Avivo Converter, everything was fine. It didn't work with all the steps you've taken as I did the same things you did. When I installed Avivo converter, all was well. Also,you can only enable GPU when converting to Mpeg2 and, I had to disable the preview for it to work. Hope this helps.