New era of GPU. Ananadtech needs to do this.

[dug777]

Dug, I cannot even begin to count the amount of percentile statistics you just pulled from thin air.
(Not a single link to back them up). How many people do you think create home movies from camcorders in the world? 7? Maybe 8?
I have literally dozens of old Hi-8 tapes I want to convert to my own DVD movies, but I don't have that kind of time. So I think that if anything could speed up that process, it would be a plus. Instead of waiting hours for final encoding, perhaps I can do it real time or faster.
So you can say whatever percent of whatever userbase you want, but those are made up numbers.

The only percentage figure was a pulled-out of my ass 99%, so calm down

Like I said, just a stream of consciousness from me, and entirely there for debate, perhaps rather than off-hand dismissal

In any event, you may have those video tapes, and many others no doubt do to, but I just can't see anyone other than a particularly dedicated and savvy person who is familar and comfortable with fiddling with relatively fiddly software and hardware doing something like that.

Again, it's way too easy to forget that we are a bizzarely tiny proportion of computer users with far more experience and comfort stuffing around with hardware and software.

The thought of getting the right gear to plug your film camcorder into your computer, to talk to the piece of software you are using, heck, you have lost most people then IMO.

Even with a decent speed boost from a CPU, it's going to be hard for people to justify a discrete card investment for a once-off task like that (plus most people in my experience are entirely loth to even open their computer cases, again 'most people' being those you meet everyday IRL, not on here).

Say it takes 10x longer using a CPU, for most people that's still going to be cost-effective in that circumstances unless they have huge volumes of footage and want to archive it all.

And that's just video encoding.

Again, more generally why do you need to offload work to a GPU if you have an i3/i5/i7 sitting doing sweet-FA for most of the time?

I'm not at all sure I am right, I just haven't seen any arguments about GPGPU in the mainstream desktop (or laptop) space that have convinced me that people need this, let alone want it.

We will see how things develop, but I just don't see people buying billions of discrete cards just to encode home movies a bit faster

Given a choice between shelling out a couple of hundred dollars, or even a hundred dollars, I can see most people, if they even get that far, being happy to take a bit longer and avoid the hassle and expense of buying and installing a discrete card for the job. After-all, encoding home-movies is not exactly mission critical, if they have spent years gathering dust who cares how long it takes, within reason?

In any event, what do you think about my alternative proposition: that GPGPU becomes relevant in mainstream desktop use a result of the dramatic increase in increasingly powerful integrated on-die GPUs, that are more than enough to leverage GPGPU apps for that vast vast vast majority of computer users...again leaving the need for discrete GPGPU cards out in the cold for those users...?

 

[Red Storm]

In any event, what do you think about my alternative proposition: that GPGPU becomes relevant in mainstream desktop use a result of the dramatic increase in increasingly powerful integrated on-die GPUs, that are more than enough to leverage GPGPU apps for that vast vast vast majority of computer users...again leaving the need for discrete GPGPU cards out in the cold for those users...?

It certainly will be interesting to see what can be done with the forthcoming on-die GPUs. Imagine for instance in the gaming market. Who needs to buy a 2nd video card when your CGPU already has that capability on-die? I think the GPGPU market will definitely become more interesting and widespread once Fusion and whatever Intel calls their CGPU chip become mainstream. Not everybody has a high performance let alone dedicated (or even dual GPU) card setup, but pretty soon everyone that buys/builds a new computer will have a potentially midrange capable GPU packaged with their CPU.

 

[dug777]

It certainly will be interesting to see what can be done with the forthcoming on-die GPUs. Imagine for instance in the gaming market. Who needs to buy a 2nd video card when your CGPU already has that capability on-die? I think the GPGPU market will definitely become more interesting and widespread once Fusion and whatever Intel calls their CGPU chip become mainstream. Not everybody has a high performance let alone dedicated (or even dual GPU) card setup, but pretty soon everyone that buys/builds a new computer will have a potentially midrange capable GPU packaged with their CPU.

Indeed, and in that circumstance (which might drive GPGPU just because 'it's there' and effectively a free boost) the task of pushing discrete cards, as you have said, seems likely to become harder even for gaming.

One interesting if perhaps unlikely option would be intel offering some form of physics co-processing that ran on their integrated GPUs. Intel could push it as being video vendor agnostic, and the only loser would be the proprietary 'physX' from nVidia, as I would argue both nVidia and AMD would benefit from a broader 'hardware physics engine' capable install base

 

[darckhart]

i don't think AT *needs* to do this. It's primarily a hardware site that showcases the latest hardware's capability. If one of the major selling points of the hardware is for X function, then AT would do good to deeply investigate that. afaik, video encoding is not touted as one of those "must have" features. It's more of a "oh look, we can do this too" sort of thing. Therefore, AT mentions it, tests it lightly, and moves on. Besides, there's other websites out there whose sole purpose *is* to investigate video encoding and the hardware that maximizes performance.

on the topic of using gpu for video encoding, until there's support for the tools i usually use (avisynth, x264, vc-1, etc) i won't be using the gpu for it. besides the few "pro" software packages (that cost far more than most amateurs can justify) that can do it, the majority (last i read) produced really, really fast crappy-looking results.

 

[Keysplayr]

One thing you say here stands out above the rest, but before I go there, let me assure you that I "am" calm. Just because you picture me screaming while you read my text, doesn't make it so, and we "are" debating "your" stream of consciouness.
Ok, you aren't considering that it is in fact the average jane/joe that would be video editing more than we do in here. We are primarily gamers in here. And even so, there are tons of people in here that edit video either for a hobby, or professionally.
So you have the whole thing exactly reversed. "Out there" is where the average users take video of their 2.4 kids birthdays, graduations, bas mitzvahs, accomplishments, all through their lives. Multiply that by hundreds of millions. There is your market.

 

[Caribbean Geek]

I *thought* that Kaspersky was just using Nvidia hardware to help detect new viruses, or something like that. It was more of a research part from a corporate stand point. I didn't think it helped the PC user at all. Am I wrong on this? I can't imagine processing power is what limits a virus scan. All the processing power in the world won't make my harddrive spin faster than 7200 RPM.

You are right, during an Antivirus scan, you are usually bottlenecked by the Hard Drive, GPU virus scanning probably would benefit users using slow single core CPU which are more of a bottleneck than the Hard Drive itself.

Does that really need that much horsepower? The only time I've really dealt with non digital video I just plugged the camera into my DVD recorder and ripped to DVD's that way (I think, it was a while ago).

DVD is easy on processors, try to encode an MP4 H.264 file or WMV file, they run slow on a fully utilized Quad Core (like mine), and using MediaShow Expresso on my GPU, cut the encoding time by 70%.

 

[Idontcare]

Hi all, your friendly neighborhood GPU editor here;

I just wanted to let you know that I've seen this thread and I do think it's an interesting idea. I can't really comment besides that - there's a lot of research that would be required before even deciding to go ahead on an article like this, and I'm currently up to my neck in video cards. We do want to expand our GPGPU coverage (and I'm heading to NVIDIA's GPU Tech Conference in 2 weeks to jumpstart that process) so this is definitely a good suggestion.

-Thanks
Ryan Smith

Thanks Ryan for taking time to drop us and the OP a note letting us know we have been noticed and we have been heard :thumbsup:

Now that we've all done the hard part here in this thread I guess we just sit back at this point and let you get on with fleshing out the minor details and taking care of all the easy stuff that goes into such a review

 

[Lonyo]

Thanks Ryan for taking time to drop us and the OP a note letting us know we have been noticed and we have been heard :thumbsup:

Now that we've all done the hard part here in this thread I guess we just sit back at this point and let you get on with fleshing out the minor details and taking care of all the easy stuff that goes into such a review

Or we could turn it into a thread where we work out which sorts of applications people want to know about most (e.g. folding, video encoding), what is available in different areas (Photoshop, Badaboom etc), and the sorts of things people want to know (ATI vs NV, GF100 architecture vs 200 series cards, 512MB vs 1GB RAM etc), so that they can keep reading and get inspired

 

[Kenmitch]

So you have the whole thing exactly reversed. "Out there" is where the average users take video of their 2.4 kids birthdays, graduations, bas mitzvahs, accomplishments, all through their lives. Multiply that by hundreds of millions. There is your market.

I'd think that the " Out there " crowd whom you speak of are currently lining up at Best Buy and the big box stores purchasing what the Geek squad is telling them to purchase. Most of the " Out there " crowd purchases a video camera and uses the software that was included with it. This " Out there " crowd is also the ones that buy the crappy video card with the most ram on it also. I doubt anything can change for those you shop by price and not features and capabilities. You take the average computer user and survey them and I bet they'll tell you money is more valuable than the time it takes to rip a video clip to your hard drive and upload it to YouTube

That being said I don't have a problem with a review and it might make some interesting reading....Unless you have some hidden agenda for the whole purpose of such said review.

To me it kinda seems like some threads are started with the intention of flame baiting the other side.....Sometimes in the subconscious mind that is!

I'm not gonna argue belief's with you but with the highlighted comment in your quoted post it just kinda seems like you....Let your subconscious have a turn at typing

 

[dug777]

One thing you say here stands out above the rest, but before I go there, let me assure you that I "am" calm. Just because you picture me screaming while you read my text, doesn't make it so, and we "are" debating "your" stream of consciouness.
Ok, you aren't considering that it is in fact the average jane/joe that would be video editing more than we do in here. We are primarily gamers in here. And even so, there are tons of people in here that edit video either for a hobby, or professionally.
So you have the whole thing exactly reversed. "Out there" is where the average users take video of their 2.4 kids birthdays, graduations, bas mitzvahs, accomplishments, all through their lives. Multiply that by hundreds of millions. There is your market.

Agreed, but where we differ appears to be our view as to how likely it is that those people will:

a) even be prepared to try to digitise these things themselves; and

b) if they have surmounted a), be prepared to pay for a discrete card to make it faster.

My proposition is that a) is a significant hurdle and will eliminate most people, and b) is a kicker that just makes any market even smaller.

I just can't see those remaining people saying 'gee, my i5 will take an hour to encode this tape/DVD, if I bought a DAAMIT/nVidia discrete card for say $100USD I could cut this back to 15 minutes' and then deciding to buy the card rather than spend a few more nights/weeks doing it on the CPU.

That picture is made even worse by the prospect of increasingly powerful on-die GPUs. If you can get your 2x or 4x speed boost from your onboard GPU, the discrete GPU becomes an even harder sell.

Who knows really, but we will no doubt find out in the next couple of years

As to the tone of your initial response, I was perhaps being overly sensitive in feeling that it was a rather abrupt and enthusiastic 'brush-off' Peace eh

 

[WelshBloke]

DVD is easy on processors, try to encode an MP4 H.264 file or WMV file, they run slow on a fully utilized Quad Core (like mine), and using MediaShow Expresso on my GPU, cut the encoding time by 70%.

Are you talking about using an HD source or going from DVD to H.264?

 

[Caribbean Geek]

Are you talking about using an HD source or going from DVD to H.264?

Both, I've encoded some MP4 movies at standard resolution to H.264 720P, so it can cover the whole screen of my Zune HD (Which I just found out that 480x272 will do fine ), and the rendering speed isn't spectacular, using the GPU for such tasks is much faster, but I also think that Stream performance in MediaShow Expresso 6.0 is a bit erratic, sometimes encodes slow using 56% of my GPU and using more than 60% of my CPU, other times barely uses the GPU and CPU and encodes many times faster, using the same codec. Still faster than any CPU in such discipline, but Oh well.

 

[WelshBloke]

Both, I've encoded some MP4 movies at standard resolution to H.264 720P, so it can cover the whole screen of my Zune HD (Which I just found out that 480x272 will do fine ), and the rendering speed isn't spectacular, using the GPU for such tasks is much faster, but I also think that Stream performance in MediaShow Expresso 6.0 is a bit erratic, sometimes encodes slow using 56% of my GPU and using more than 60% of my CPU, other times barely uses the GPU and CPU and encodes many times faster, using the same codec. Still faster than any CPU in such discipline, but Oh well.

Whats the point of upscaling a DVD with your PC so your Zune can downscale it?

 

[Caribbean Geek]

Whats the point of upscaling a DVD with your PC so your Zune can downscale it?

Cause I wanted to connect it to my LCD TV, plus I'm a bit picky about image quality, having lots of movies in a hand sized device connected to your LCD or Plasma is quite a dream in terms of device footprint, plus the Zune HD can playback 720P files with no slodowns (Thanks to Tegra!)

 

[WelshBloke]

Cause I wanted to connect it to my LCD TV, plus I'm a bit picky about image quality, having lots of movies in a hand sized device connected to your LCD or Plasma is quite a dream in terms of device footprint, plus the Zune HD can playback 720P files with no slodowns (Thanks to Tegra!)

Wouldn't you be better off just transcoding the DVD at the original resolution?

It would take less encoding time and you would get the same image quality.

 

[Caribbean Geek]

I wanted to save some space because I have the 16GB version but that's ok. You mean to 720P right? I should be able to fit at least 6 movies if I choose the right bitrate. With Cybershow MediaExpresso, I can transcode more than 4 movies at the same time with no slowdowns, seems that's very hard to exploit the wide parallelism of the current GPU's.

 

[WelshBloke]

I wanted to save some space because I have the 16GB version but that's ok. You mean to 720P right? I should be able to fit at least 6 movies if I choose the right bitrate. With Cybershow MediaExpresso, I can transcode more than 4 movies at the same time with no slowdowns, seems that's very hard to exploit the wide parallelism of the current GPU's.

No, NTSC DVD (I'm assuming you're in the US) is 720 x 480. I'd encode it to that and let the TV scale it up if it needs to. You're not going to get any more detail than is in the source material (which is 720 x 480)

 

[tommo123]

No, NTSC DVD (I'm assuming you're in the US) is 720 x 480. I'd encode it to that and let the TV scale it up if it needs to. You're not going to get any more detail than is in the source material (which is 720 x 480)

true, but you'd be surprised (or not) at what upscaling can achieve. some of the Avi synth scripts on doom9 are nuts. slow down encoding times by a factor of 50 last time i tried it though

 

[rolodomo]

Well, try Cyberlink MediaExpresso, is a nice program that takes advantage of nVidia's CUDA and AMD's Stream,

Thanks for pointing to some of the Cyberlink products, has as others have also done in this thread. I'm getting good results on my GTX 480 with their video editor, powerdirector 8 ultra. On the transcoding jobs that have cuda support, such as H.264 720p upscaling to 1080p 24 Mbps, I'm seeing an average GPU utilization of 50%. Not bad for a $90 program. Encoding times are drastically reduced from my prior video editor, Sony Vegas 9.0 (although version 10.0 does have limited GPU support). Video quality looks good, but I'm no expert at judging it.

Like others have mentioned, they also support ATI stream.

 

[rolodomo]

Thanks for pointing to some of the Cyberlink products, has as others have also done in this thread. I'm getting good results on my GTX 480 with their video editor, powerdirector 8 ultra. On the transcoding jobs that have cuda support, such as H.264 720p upscaling to 1080p 24 Mbps, I'm seeing an average GPU utilization of 50%. Not bad for a $90 program. Encoding times are drastically reduced from my prior video editor, Sony Vegas 9.0 (although version 10.0 does have limited GPU support). Video quality looks good, but I'm no expert at judging it.

Like others have mentioned, they also support ATI stream.

Sorry to revive this thread, but its worth a mention that Cyberlink just released version 9, which does all the above plus natively supports 64-bit, which is a BFD when you're transcoding HD video projects. They're actually programming thier consumer-level video editor to take advantage of the latest graphics cards (both AMD and NVIDIA), 64-bit operating systems, and CPU(s), so I think it's worth a mention.