Transcoding/Decoding performance bang for the buck upgrade

[raventerp]

I often run a transcoding of HD wtv video files from Media Center to 720p or 400p H.264 mp4's. I'm making use of Intel Quick Sync courtesy of my i5-2500k @ 4.2Ghz, p8z77-v pro and Arcsoft MediaConverter is my tool of choice.

I noticed recently how big of an impact GPU performance can have on this process. I converted a 25 min 1080i wtv clip to 400p H264 and it took 1 min 13 secs for that transcode. When I tried turning off hardware GPU decoding in MediaConverter, that same conversion took 4 min 14 secs! Percentage-wise I was shocked at the difference. My graphics card is an ancient 8600GTS card.

After looking through some reviews I saw that the GT 520 offers insane decoding performance (297 fps for 1080i MPEG2).

My question is, would the $50 upgrade to this card offer a massive performance upgrade to my usual transcoding job? What type of performance benefit could I expect? The rest of my desktop is modern (SSD's, 16GB of RAM,etc.) so this seems like a way to bolster my transcoding performance easily and cheapily. (I'm not looking to upgrade my CPU right now which I know is an obvious upgrade option). Thanks in advance for any comments or suggestions.

 

[prankonmoon]

Hi raventerp,

I'm amazed to your observation on i5-2500K performance with and without GPU for 1080i video. I would be grateful if you could please share the only decoding performance on Intel HD 3000 for 1080p (preferably or 1080i) H.264 Video Sequence Decode.
Thanks really appreciate your response.

prankonmoon

I often run a transcoding of HD wtv video files from Media Center to 720p or 400p H.264 mp4's. I'm making use of Intel Quick Sync courtesy of my i5-2500k @ 4.2Ghz, p8z77-v pro and Arcsoft MediaConverter is my tool of choice.

I noticed recently how big of an impact GPU performance can have on this process. I converted a 25 min 1080i wtv clip to 400p H264 and it took 1 min 13 secs for that transcode. When I tried turning off hardware GPU decoding in MediaConverter, that same conversion took 4 min 14 secs! Percentage-wise I was shocked at the difference. My graphics card is an ancient 8600GTS card.

After looking through some reviews I saw that the GT 520 offers insane decoding performance (297 fps for 1080i MPEG2).

My question is, would the $50 upgrade to this card offer a massive performance upgrade to my usual transcoding job? What type of performance benefit could I expect? The rest of my desktop is modern (SSD's, 16GB of RAM,etc.) so this seems like a way to bolster my transcoding performance easily and cheapily. (I'm not looking to upgrade my CPU right now which I know is an obvious upgrade option). Thanks in advance for any comments or suggestions.