GPU encoding with 5970

[Rubycon]

Where to start?
This is supposed to better with a GPU.

Can I split up workers one on for each CPU and one for each GPU, etc? Looking to maximize throughput.

 

[alyarb]

actually, it's not supposed to be better. just faster. the available software is very basic. you aren't going to find anything that lets you do the load balancing yourself. in fact this software niche is so immature right now that we are basically struggling for high quality output.

cyberlink's mediashow espresso is the only complete software suite that works with ATI and nvidia hardware, and in my opinion it's only good for transcoding to mobile devices, because the low resolution allows you to hide much of the crappy quality. I haven't used it myself, I've only read reviews and seen screenshots of various outputs. If you want my advice, continue to do your high-quality encodes on x86 with x264 using handbrake, automkv, etc. If you have mobile devices that you can transcode to, then go ahead and experiment with GPU encoding. It's come a long way but we still aren't there yet (remember anand's article? he couldn't even get the audio to sync).

This is probably the best article to start with

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/978/1/

 

[Rubycon]

Yes better means faster in this line of work, definitely!

Now if plugins were SMP able!

 

[TheRyuu]

You're probably better off looking into x264 which is probably faster and most definitely produces better quality output then any GPU encoder.

 

[smitbret]

Wait a minute.... so what you're telling me is that the GPU can encode, too? I thought GPU off-loading was limited to decoding.

 

[Cattykit]

There are various plug-ins and softwares you can use and they'll greatly improve encoding performance as you know. The problem is that they all come with too much limitations and quality losses. Last time I checked (several months ago), none were worth it.

Then, as I mentioned in http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2067686, Adobe PP CS5 seems to do the job without such problems. For now, I think upcoming PP CS5 is the only solution.

 

[TheRyuu]

Wait a minute.... so what you're telling me is that the GPU can encode, too? I thought GPU off-loading was limited to decoding.

It can encode certain aspects (of I assume) h264. Motion search is probably the most logical thing to have the gpu do. All the entropy encoding will (probably) still be done on the cpu.