CUDA-Enabled Apps: Measuing Mainstream GPU Performance

[captaincharisma]

makes me wonder how many PS3 owners actually enable the feature that will use there PS3 for folding@home?

 

[Guest]

for converting to palm or hand held, badaboom is pointless. pocket DVD is a much better answer. Put the disk in pick the format and walk away.
With badaboom, you have first to decrept the DVD, then encode is vob file, one at a time. How is this fast and better than just putting a DVD in and walking away. I bought Badaboom and am really sorry I did.

 

[Guest]

Any CUDA transcoding apps for the MAC? I know I can run bootcamp, but I haven't seen any native apps so far.

MKS

 

[pisaukilatli]

I did transcoding with MediaCoder which supports GPU video encoding. Tested it on a 1 hour MPEG2 HD video (720 x 576, 3.2 GB) and set the output bitrate to 8000 kbps. The transcoding time is surprisingly only 14 minutes (the stat showed 220 fps) with CPU utilization of about 60%. I guess the CPU is partially used for decoding.
Tested Badaboom 1.2.1 on the same video file, it lasted 18:30 minutes (90 fps, 8000 kbps) with CPU utilization as low as 10%.
I didn't do any quality comparison between the outputs, but in the first glance they look similar.
Based on this experience, I think GPU may have give us something in terms of additional computing power. Although I can see that it may take a while until we can fully utilize it. But again it can flourish only in application where the computing can be paralelized.

Note: The sytem for testing (i7 940, GTX 295, XP Pro 32 bit)

 

[fwupow]

CUDA for dummies? It turns GPUs into co-processors? It's Nvidia?
ATI has their own version called STREAM?
Only a handfull of applications utilize CUDA?
Even fewer applications utilize STREAM?

Sounds new and messy. I'll come back later when it's called STRUDA and almost every app uses it.

I'm big into transcoding but it's all into 720x480 DivX. The video apps cited in this article either don't use CUDA extensively enough or they're just fancy GUIs pasted on top of hideously basic video editors.

 

[fwupow]

That MediaCoder sounds interesting pisaukilatli. The major flaw of every free video app that I've tried, is that they don't support automatic multi-pass file processing. That's why I keep coming back to my DivX Author program, which runs the analysis pass automatically before the 2nd and final pass. It doesn't support batch processing though. VirtualDub gives you batch processing but you have to run analysis passes manually.

 

[danwat1234]

Bring back the Seti@home 3.03 single threaded (non SMP aware) CPU benchmark please!
Run 4 instances on a quad core Haswell with process affinities set and see how fast it takes to run through the 4 workunits.