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PowerDirector 7 Results

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2:00 AM - 05/18/2009 by William Van Winkle

PowerDirector 7 includes 10 effects that can leverage CUDA acceleration during rendering. If you’re new to editing, the process boils down to this: you take your video clip, put it on your editing timeline, add effects (blurring, sepia toning, or whatever), and when you go to output the project into your target format, the video clip and effects get rendered into a final file. This sounds simple, but applying effects to video is tremendously compute-intensive. In fact, rendering has traditionally been the bane of video editors because one render would consume a system’s resources for hours, bringing productivity to a standstill. The size of files may be different, but home editing falls prey to the same resource limitations.

Armed with a 30-second, 720x480 MPEG-2 test clip, we added the CUDA-assisted Pen Ink effect and rendered into an MPEG-2 output file. With CUDA enabled, our render time was less than half of putting the render load entirely on the CPU on both cards. But notice two things here. Unlike with SETI@home, we see little if any benefit from all those extra stream processors in the 9800 GTX. Additionally, employing CUDA only shaved 3% to 5% of the load from the CPU, which remained almost entirely consumed by the render job. In this test, CUDA will help accelerate your task, but you’re still going to have a buried processor unable to handle any other applications.

The second test set involved a larger 1080, H.264 clip from the HDNet show Get Out!, which we then exported into PowerDirector’s MPEG-2, AVCHD 720 x 480, and AVCHD 1920 x 1080 profiles. Again, we see very little difference in performance between the 9600 GT and 9800 GTX. Also note that there is no difference in exporting into MPEG-2 with or without GPU acceleration because NVIDIA’s library is only supporting H.264 encoding, not MPEG-2 encoding. The moral of that story is that if you’re in the habit of transcoding movies into MPEG-2 files for playback on a device that doesn’t support H.264, then CUDA will be about as useful to you as a third arm while jogging.

Still, you can see that CUDA gives us over a 100% improvement on the 480 test and a nearly 300% improvement when encoding to 1080. Extend this task to the duration of a movie and you can start to see how much time CUDA might save you and your system.

Talkback
SpadeM 05/18/2009 9:04 AM
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The 8800GS or with the new name 9600GSO goes for 60$ and delivers 96 stream processors. Would it be correct to assume that it would perform betwen the 9600 GT and 9800 GTX you reviewed?

Other then that great article, been waiting for it since we got a sneak preview from Chris last week.

Curnel_D 05/18/2009 9:08 AM
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And I'll never take Nvidia marketing seriously until they either stop singing about CUDA being the holy grail of computing, or this changes: "Aside from Folding@home and SETI@home, every single application on Nvidia’s consumer CUDA list involves video editing and/or transcoding."

Anonymous 05/18/2009 9:15 AM
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As more software will use CUDA, we will not only see a great boost in performance for e.g. video performance, but for parallel programing in general. This sky rocket this business into a new age!

Curnel_D 05/18/2009 9:18 AM
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l0bd0n :
As more software will use CUDA, we will not only see a great boost in performance for e.g. video performance, but for parallel programing in general. This sky rocket this business into a new age!


Honestly, I dont think a proprietary language will do this. If anything, it's likely to be GPGPU's in general, run by Open Computing Language.(OpenCL)

one-shot 05/18/2009 9:23 AM
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Are we both thinking about the same "Pirates 2"? Or am I missing something...

IzzyCraft 05/18/2009 9:35 AM
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Who knows it's just a clip he used he could be naming it anything for the hell of it.

CUDA transcoding is very nice to someone that does H.264 transcoding at a high profile and lacks a 300+ dollar cpu who would spend hours transcoding a dvd on high profile settings.

Else from that CUDA acceleration has just been more of a feature nothing like a main event. Although can easly be the main attraction to someone that does a good flow of H.264 trasncoding/encoding.

Encoding/transcoding in h.264 high profile can easily make someone who is very content with their cpu and it's power become sad very quickly when they see the est time for their 30 min clip or something.

Anonymous 05/18/2009 9:38 AM
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I'm using CoreAVC since support was added for CUDA h264 decoding. I kinda feel stupid for buying a high end CPU (at the time) since playing all videos, no matter the resolution or bit-rate, leaves the CPU at near-idle usage.
Vid card: 8600GTS
CPU: E6700

IzzyCraft 05/18/2009 9:49 AM
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Well you lucked in considering not all of the geforce 8 series supports H.264 decoding etc.

ohim 05/18/2009 10:01 AM
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they should remove Adobe CS4 suite from there since Cuda transcoding is only posible with nvidia CX videocards not with normal gaming cards wich supports cuda.

adbat 05/18/2009 10:05 AM
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CUDA means Miracle in my language :-) I it will do those
The sad thing is that ATI does not truly compete in CUDA department and there is not standard for it.

JeanLuc 05/18/2009 10:26 AM
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I was only really interested in the Badaboom benchmarks and I was fairly impressed but I seem to remember the last time you guys done an article based on GPU accelerated apps (Cuda vs Stream) Badaboom suffered from output quality issues something that hasn't been mentioned in this article. It's all very well a 9800GTX being able to encode HD video content in half the time if the final product is no good.

cangelini 05/18/2009 10:56 AM
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Jean,

Actually, I don't believe we've done a comparison between the two. However, I have read that comparison at other sites, and it's actually ATI's Stream app that has the quality issues. Version two of the software is on the way, and it purportedly fixes the quality issues (though it still isn't demonstrating much GPU scaling, from what I've seen thus far).

ohim 05/18/2009 11:17 AM
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cangelini :
Jean,Actually, I don't believe we've done a comparison between the two. However, I have read that comparison at other sites, and it's actually ATI's Stream app that has the quality issues. Version two of the software is on the way, and it purportedly fixes the quality issues (though it still isn't demonstrating much GPU scaling, from what I've seen thus far).

yeah but chose your words carefouly since readers could be misslead on this one :) the quality of the transcoding is related to the aplication used not to the computing technology like cuda or stream.

Anonymous 05/18/2009 11:27 AM
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Cangelini, Badaboom definitely has lower quality output compared to the newest x264 builds. I'd definitely like to take advantage of my 9600 GT, but not unless I can use it with Handbrake or some other app on my own terms (NOT BASELINE OR MAIN PROFILE.)

stlunatic 05/18/2009 1:46 PM
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randomizer 05/18/2009 2:34 PM
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SpadeM :
The 8800GS or with the new name 9600GSO goes for 60$ and delivers 96 stream processors.


The 9600GSO has 2 versions (ignoring VRAM variations), one with only 48 SPs (essentially a castrated G94, not G92).

Anonymous 05/18/2009 3:12 PM
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There is a plugin for people who do audio engineering/recording/mixing/mastering from this guy:

http://www.nilsschneider.de

It runs on CUDA, but TBH, it has not manifested itself as anything special just yet, it's more a "proof of concept". However, as someone who's been doing that kind of thing for years, any quad-core ever made is good enough for real-time audio work, so there's not much point in CUDA acceleration.

jgoette 05/18/2009 4:31 PM
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Anonymous 05/18/2009 4:38 PM
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I enjoyed the article, and just like in the dual-core versus quad core debate, there remains few applications that can fully exploit CUDA.

By the way, I have quick correction. The author writes, "...that can leverage parallelism in a way that jives with CUDA’s architecture." The correct word is "jibe" not "jive."

1raflo 05/18/2009 4:51 PM
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CUDA is mostly about hype. Nothing really else.


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