@Assassinator did you see the flash movie,.?!

Did't know this thread turned out to be this informative,. ;) but there is still no good answer,. is CUDA and GPU video proccesing worth buying a fast/powerfull graphics card like the 295gtx?
Faster GPU core speeds prob also means faster video proccesing and more memory on the graphics card prob means more CUDA suport for programs suporting CUDA,.

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ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:It's also rare that you want to run 240 of the same task at once as well.

then you need an aditional proces to check if all 240 outcomes are the same,. ;p

Vegetano1 Wrote:is CUDA and GPU video proccesing worth buying a fast/powerfull graphics card like the 295gtx?

At current, no.  There's no decent video encoder which uses CUDA.  Only thing I found a while ago when searching about this, which does H.264, was RapiHD, which is a crappy baseline-profile only encoder.  I guess it could work with iPods (since they're also crappy and can only handle baseline profile CAVLC), but x264 on low settings has been shown to run faster than RapiHD on a typical quad core CPU.

Vegetano1 Wrote:Faster GPU core speeds prob also means faster video proccesing and more memory on the graphics card prob means more CUDA suport for programs suporting CUDA,.

Don't go for something that might become popular - that's just being silly.  Wait for it to become popular first, then go for it.

EDIT: perhaps x264 for CUDA hasn't yet been dropped.  Still doesn't justify getting a GPU just for CUDA, since the applications still don't exist yet.

EDIT2: found this - an encoder which does Main profile.  Apparently, they recommend disabling SLI, so dunno how well it'd run on a GTX295.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136847&page=5 for some info.

(This post was last modified: 19/02/2009 03:57 AM by ZiNgA BuRgA.)

Vegetano1 Wrote:@Assassinator did you see the flash movie,.?!

Unfortunately, not yet. I slacked off and didn't go to school today. (Uni hasn't officially started yet. Currently orientation week, the week before uni starts, there are some events, but I can't be bothered going every day)

Vegetano1 Wrote:Did't know this thread turned out to be this informative,. ;) but there is still no good answer,. is CUDA and GPU video proccesing worth buying a fast/powerfull graphics card like the 295gtx?

Maybe get someone who already has a really strong nVidia card to do some test encodes for you, to see the real effect?

Vegetano1 Wrote:Faster GPU core speeds prob also means faster video proccesing and more memory on the graphics card prob means more CUDA suport for programs suporting CUDA,.

Stronger card = faster processing. Direct relationship :)

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:He's talking about running 240 serial tasks at once.
To be honest, it's one thing I've been interested in - ie running 20+ encodes simultaneously.
Unfortunately, at present, there's other limitations, such as disk seeks, and RAM usage.

Oh sure, I run 240 encodes at the same time every day, yeah, I really do. The most amount of encodes I've run at the same time is probably 4.

As for memory usage, x264 doesn't take much itself at all (like less than 50MB). It's AviSynth that takes heaps. Use SetMemoryMax in your AviSynth script. If you're not filtering, you can safely cap the AviSynth memory usage down to something really small.

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:EDIT2: found this - an encoder which does Main profile.  Apparently, they recommend disabling SLI, so dunno how well it'd run on a GTX295.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136847&page=5 for some info.

That x264 encode seems unnaturally blocky. I wonder what settings he used... (definitely something bad. When I encode stuff, I never end up with something that blocky).

That's what I was talking about. Not being able to make proper comparisons because the settings matter quite a lot of both speed and quality.

Some other people noticed that too.

a comment on the bottom Wrote:I noticed that the x264 example image is suffering from artifacts due to nearest-neighbor resizing, it looks like it was encoded at a substantially lower resolution, or at the very least not resampled correctly for playback. You might want to verify that the settings used were correct, as it should look substantially better than the BadaBoom results.

Ha, nearest-neighbor resizing.

x264 supports high profile and all the rest of the crazy shit that no other encoder currently supports. Shouldn't loose to anything in quality if used properly.

(This post was last modified: 19/02/2009 04:09 AM by Assassinator.)

AVS taking the memory, even if it's just a single line DirectShowSource?  Didn't know that.

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:AVS taking the memory, even if it's just a single line DirectShowSource?  Didn't know that.

Yeah, seems to default to using a crapload of memory even if it's just a DSS call. I think it may default to some percentage of your total memory.

Anyway, updated my previous post.

Assassinator Wrote:

Vegetano1 Wrote:Did't know this thread turned out to be this informative,. ;) but there is still no good answer,. is CUDA and GPU video proccesing worth buying a fast/powerfull graphics card like the 295gtx?

Maybe get someone who already has a really strong nVidia card to do some test encodes for you, to see the real effect?

yes wish i knew someone who got a 295gtx because maybe there is a cd-rom with the video converter included with the graphics card,. ;p

EDIT: thanks to Zinga's link i found Badaboom v1.1.1
that thread basicly explains everything i need to know about CUDA,. its still work in progress and if i am correct its open source and its also clear to me CUDA was here more then a year ago,..

specs and download:
http://www.badaboomit.com/?q=node/4

Badaboom is a commercial application - it's not open source.  Anyway, the speed comparisons show that there's barely a 2x gain in speed, even if wee assume away encoder settings, it's hardly close to nVidia's claim on 20x.

Eh, I can encode an anime episode to the PSP in 4 minutes with my Q6600 on stock clocks.  How much faster do you want it?

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:Badaboom is a commercial application - it's not open source.  Anyway, the speed comparisons show that there's barely a 2x gain in speed, even if wee assume away encoder settings, it's hardly close to nVidia's claim on 20x.

Eh, I can encode an anime episode to the PSP in 4 minutes with my Q6600 on stock clocks.  How much faster do you want it?

20x,.. ...

Did't mean Badaboom but CUDA,. read something about CUDA being open-source,.

the flash movie nvidia is showing of clearly steats 20x faster,. O_o but yes on Doom9 i read its only/berely 2x faster,. and i think its not even high quality,. but "baseline"?
also i read that it was AMD and Ati who tried to convert with GPU first,.

prices for upgrade-kit and 295gtx still the same,. ;p

Vegetano1 Wrote:20x,.. ...

Did't mean Badaboom but CUDA,. read something about CUDA being open-source,.

the flash movie nvidia is showing of clearly steats 20x faster,. O_o but yes on Doom9 i read its only/berely 2x faster,. and i think its not even high quality,. but "baseline"?
also i read that it was AMD and Ati who tried to convert with GPU first,.

prices for upgrade-kit and 295gtx still the same,. ;p

Baseline is the profile. So no really advanced features and stuff. It doesn't really effect the quality, just the compression rate, so you won't be able to compress as much. if you want high quality, you still can get high quality, it'll just be bigger. If you're only just encoding to play on the PSP or something, baseline is all you need.

Again, you can't really rely on that 20x faster... You can get 20x faster by just tweaking the settings...

Vegetano1 Wrote:read something about CUDA being open-source,.

Oh, don't get confused :P  Open source = source code is freely available.  CUDA is an open platform (publicly documented - ie the PSP isn't "open" because Sony discourages homebrew development) but there isn't really any source code for it.  Well, I guess the compilers, but IDK if nVidia gave away the source code for the compilers.

(This post was last modified: 19/02/2009 04:56 PM by ZiNgA BuRgA.)