Catalyst 8.12 BETA. Impressions?

[blashyrkh]

Hello everyone.

I was just wondering about what you are all thinki9ng about the new 8.12 drivers. Has anyone used them yet? (besides me!). I installed and ofcourse, the first thing I checked was the AVIVO converter. The thing is, my computer is kinda new, so I haven't played around video conversion yet (I do that for my psp and iphone). So, i decided to convert a 200mb file for my psp. It did it at 30 sec which is good but the thing is, my cpu was @100% (both cores)!! I tried checking the GPU activity during conversion but it looked like it stayed at near zero. What is going on?? Am I using the GPU for transcoding or the CPU like before? Anyone ??


Only difference I noticed is that fallout 3 is not crashing anymore, which is good.

thats all!

 

[skittle]

AVIVO wont be any faster than a encoder using your CPU anyway... (Not to mention it cannot come anywhere near the same quality)

What GPU do you have?

 

[daedalus685]

Need specs. The AVIVO converter will only use the GPU if you have a 4000 series card.

As for me, these drivers carry over the same problems that have existed since 8.10 hotfix 2. That is that crossfire will not function in a 4870 setup under vista 64. That being the case as soon as I fiddled with the drivers trying to get CF to work I went back to 8.10 and crossed my fingers for 8.12 wqhl.

From what I have seen around, the converter will use about 30% gpu at the moment for those that the betas work at all for. BETA is the key word here, as it seems the converter only works for some people and doesnt work all that well for any.

Cheers

 

[skittle]

I went and tried out the AVIVO video encoder...

Besides there being a total lack of encoder options... the quality SUCKS!

At most 25% of my GPU, and for only a small portion of the video.
8:05 MPEG2 clip from pulpfiction took 30s to complete.

The same file using the iPod preset in megui took 1:02s to complete, but looked much much better. No (severe) blocking, so smearing, no artifacts.

 

[Just_An_Engineer]

AVIVO wont be any faster than a encoder using your CPU anyway... (Not to mention it cannot come anywhere near the same quality)

What GPU do you have?

AVIVO is many times faster than any CPU encoder. I've been using it since it was first made available with the X1K series. If I were to encode a 1hr MPEG2 file @720x480 to Divx using something like TMPGEnc it might take a couple of hours (and that's with no filters). The same file will encode to Divx with AVIVO in less than 30 minutes typically. Furthermore if you have things configured correctly the difference in quality is pretty much indistinguishable.

 

[Just_An_Engineer]

The AVIVO converter will only use the GPU if you have a 4000 series card.

This isn't true. I don't know why everyone is assuming that AVIVO is something new. It was released with the X1K cards 2 years ago and has been available for download on ATI's site for quite some time. I have probably transcoded a couple of hundred videos with it using my old X1950pro and more recently with my 4670.

Every time I have used it the GPU load goes to 100% so perhaps the 30% limit you mentioned is something unique to the Vista drivers. It wouldn't surprise me if this is yet another thing that Vista causes to function improperly. It works fine on XP Pro at any rate/

 

[skittle]

The GPU functionality is something that is brand new with the 8.12 drivers. Thats why its such a big deal. The previous AVIVO encoder did NOT use the GPU at all.

Also im so very sorry that you have encoded so many movies with avivo... Its quality cant even come close to that of x264.

By the way, it is NOT faster than *any* cpu encoder... I can encode a 720x480 1hour video with x264 in less than 30minutes very easily. My Q6600 is happily chugging along encoding with x264 at 76fps. To put this in perspective... thats equates to about 20 minutes for a one hour show.

 

[Just_An_Engineer]

The GPU functionality is something that is brand new with the 8.12 drivers. Thats why its such a big deal. The previous AVIVO encoder did NOT use the GPU at all.

Also im so very sorry that you have encoded so many movies with avivo... Its quality cant even come close to that of x264.

By the way, it is NOT faster than *any* cpu encoder... I can encode a 720x480 1hour video with x264 in less than 30minutes very easily. My Q6600 is happily chugging along encoding with x264 at 76fps. To put this in perspective... thats equates to about 20 minutes for a one hour show.

Say what you will about the quality, but I have found that my output from Avivo is generally nearly indistinguishable from the source. You are correct that it won't be as good as a CPU encoder that will allow you to tweak the the image quality, but if the source is clean and doesn't need any tweaking Avivo does a passable job.

Speed can be somewhat relative. I happen to have a 3 year old processor in my media box so encoding usually goes very slow for me. I usually get about 3X the frames per second using Avivo so I tend to use it for small jobs where the source is pretty clean and I only plan to encode a couple of files at a time. It definitely does have it's flaws however. The lack of a batch encode option is definitely one as well as the lack of any real options as you pointed out. Hopefully some of the developers out there will make use of the SDK that ATI released a while back and apply GPU acceleration to one of the more established encoding programs.

 

[blashyrkh]

Guys, I have a 4870 @512 ans my CPU is a pentium 5200 (45nm) @3,66Ghz. Ati claimed 10x the performance of a quad core or something like that. The only thing left to do is download some other program for transcoding and compare. Can anyone recomend one??

Also, there are OPTIONS for encoding using Avivo. You just have to look. Check your codecs and especially the ffdshow and others and you'll see that a new hardware encoder called ATI AVIVO has appeared in the setting and you can choose it. There are plenty of option for both video/audio there. I wonder if it is possible to apply filters or upscale in real time using avivo...

 

[skittle]

The only thing left to do is download some other program for transcoding and compare. Can anyone recomend one?.

meGUI
Ripbot264
AutoMKV
Staxrip

I wonder if it is possible to apply filters or upscale in real time using avivo...

This is already possible using DirectX video shaders. The 10x speedup ATI claimed... well that just doesnt show up in any real world application.

The real limitation to the GPU encoder (and decoder) is that it is limited to BASELINE ONLY. maximum of 2 bframes. No AQ. NO CRF or CQ. No avisynth input...
Sorry, but I care about the quality of my encodes, and if you think the ATI encoder does transparent encodes then you must be blind.