Faster CUDA performance ??

Paul wrote:

Smarty wrote:
Phat_Jethro wrote:

On 6/1/2010 2:53 PM, Smarty wrote:
snip
Thanks Paul and Jim for your insightful comments. I share Paul's
concern about making a steep investment with no assurance of a
productivity pay-off. My ONLY motive for replacing this video
card with an expensive alternative is to get a big boost in
rendering speed, and I would be extremely unhappy if that did
not pan out.

I also have the issue which Jim raises to deal with. My power
supply is the smaller "standard" supply Dell offered in this
XPS420. They had an optional 750 watt supply (I think it was
750) but the smaller supply I purchased which is either 400 or
500 watts does not have a lot of spare capacity left. I have 3
hard drives, 2 optical drives, a couple PCI and PCI-E cards,
along with the QX9650, RAM, etc. I suspect I have a hundred
watts to spare at most, but had not considered the extra power
supply load and inevitable heating at all.

I'm going to do a bit more research and see what if any info I
can get from Pegasys, the authors of TMPGExpress, the program I
most often used to transcode, render, and filter.

Thanks once again.

Smarty
The age of the PSU makes a difference as well as they lose some
capacity over time. I started with a new 550W 3 years ago. It was
fine in my system with E6600, 2Gb RAM, 2 HDD's and 2 optical with
8800GTS. 3 years later with upgrades to a E8500, 4Gb RAM. 4
HDD's. Now the PSU starts the Insta-shutoff "feature" when
running 3D games. 700W PSU fixed that issue.

J

Not entirely surprising. Electrolytic caps used for filtering lose
some of their capacitance. Heat sinks and diode bridges and other
components get loaded with dust and dirt, raising their
temperatures, and then causing some thermal safeguards to kick in
sooner.

Thanks for the warning!


"Utilize NVIDIA CUDA For Filtering and Decoding"

http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/pr..._new.html#cuda

It would appear the main advantage comes from some "sharpen"
operations done in CUDA. Otherwise, it is hard to say what exactly
CUDA buys.

And the word Encoding is not associated with CUDA.

They do have a SPURS plugin, which would use a Cell based accelerator
card, for encoding.

*******

On another encoder software page for a different product, they
claimed to be doing encoding with CUDA, but the only performance
metric was something like

"Up to 50% better performance"

with no references to hardware used at all (i.e. indicating which
processor and which video card are being compared).

I guess you're supposed to fill your computer with various odds
and ends, to get acceleration :-)

Paul


I think your assessment is correct Paul, but not complete, since CUDA
does accelerate encoding in some software (such as Cyberlink Power
Director, Cyberlink PowerProducer, Badaboom, and others) as well as
speeds up filtering in some of the 18 filters provided by TMPGExpress
including the Sharpen function (which I use often). The Spurs Engine
boards from Leadtek (and the Firecoder Blu, a very similar if not
identical board from GrassValley / Edius) also make legitimate claims
to speed up rendering / transcoding,to and from mpeg2 to mpeg4/AVC, a
function I also use a lot. As you may imagine, these functions are
painfully slow even with a quadcore, and those of us who do it a lot
are seeking acceleration solutions both software and hardware-based.

For the time being, I am going to avoid the extra expense of a new
nVidia board. Although it appears that the power supply load (only)
increases from about 70 watts to about 106 watts by switching from my
current 8800GT to a very high performance new, faster board, the cost
is quite prohibitive.

Matrox has yet another acceleration hardware product, and I want to do
a little more research before making any big purchases, since the
choices are not only pricey but also very limited in terms of their
supported formats and profiles, often leading the result that certain
formats are highly accelerated but others are unavailable. This appears
to be especially true for the type of work I do here, 1920 by 1080 AVC.

Thanks again for the help and inputs and suggestions!