The WinFast PxVC1100 Video Transcoding Card: Worth The Price?

[intelliclint]

I agree with others that this card will go the way of Physx and the x87. At least I hope it will. In the future, codecs should take advantage of direct compute, OpenCl, or CUDA. Then most systems can take advantage of real processing power made available by a massively multi-core processor would allow. This chip has only 8 pipes at 1.5Ghz, think what the hundreds could do on a GPU.

In the end having this board pushes the industry in a direction of measuring the want and value of the consumer.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]intelliclint[/nom]In the end having this board pushes the industry in a direction of measuring the want and value of the consumer.[/citation]

I don't agree. There have always been specialized cards for certain segments of the population. In the video arena especially there have been realtime editing cards for years, but that hasn't stopped CPUs from getting faster and faster, and it hasn't stopped desktop video from getting better and better.

The PxVC1100 was never intended for the mass market, but for encoding enthusiasts there's a lot of value here. This is a fringe product, and a good one from where I'm standing. But I don't see the market being significant enough to push the CPU or graphics card manufacturers to change their roadmaps or affect the populace in general.

 

[ordos96]

So does this card handle DX11? Or did i miss something here that enables the GeForce 260 to handle DX11 now?

 

[cleeve]

So does this card handle DX11? Or did i miss something here that enables the GeForce 260 to handle DX11 now?

You missed something pretty substantial. The WinFast PxVC1100 is not a graphics card at all.

 

[ordos96]

Lol, that was part of the point.

 

[dheadley]

In the end having this board pushes the industry in a direction of measuring the want and value of the consumer.

Aren't you doing just that by saying that the whole industry should focus on GPU acceleration?

Despite what people on these tech sites like to believe I'd be willing to bet that over half computer users out there could use a computer with an intergrated Intel chipset with zero acceleration and never want for anything more. So in effect the modern Nvidia or ATI dedicated GPU is a special purpose card that is a want not a need.

 

[ebattleon]

Now if they just made a video card using the Cell or better yet a mainstream CPU i would be so happy...great performance with low power good combo..especially with good pricing.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Informative article. There were a few things I didn't understand very well. I do not do a lot of video encoding. Instead I do a lot of digital image processing so it will not benefit me.

 

[Guest]

I have been interested in similar solutions but my approach is to do all my coding on a laptop. I assume that the coding mentioned in this article is also relevant when you code a video in any video editing software (?).

I am currently hunting for a new laptop as my Dual Core based system is unable to work with full HD files. Has anyone heard of laptops on the market with similar technology built in? Extension cards available that does the same?

Otherwise the obvious solution seems to be to go for a i7 or even a i5. Sadly the current selection (in Malaysia where I live currently) is rather flimsy and very costly. Asus is the only one out there with a i7 but it is not to my liking (Only 4GB max mem etc).

 

[thomaslompton]

What would happen if you used 2 or more WinFast PxVC1100??? Would the driver thread across multiple cards? Could you create a small encoding factory?

 

[pandemonium_ctp]

Not knowing any products that Toshiba made that impacted anything profoundly, this is quite remarkable.

I especially admired the fact that this hardware can allow an outdated CPU to be utilized for video encoding. That's a very powerful testimony for the card's capability of simply filling a 1x PCI slot and rendering with hardware.

Nice definitive comparison to give us some real results where the product excels. Thanks, Don. ^^

 

[Guest]

Can we plug like 6 of these? if so. that will be cool

 

[hella-d]

CUDA Is Prolly Faster And Dosent Require A "Special" Card, Save Your Money....Use CUDA, They Should Have Tried Comparing The Cell Based Hardware To CUDA Using Mediacoder (Its Free I Might Add), Witch DOES Support Actual Transcoding Of Videos With CUDA, I Use It All The Time To Encode Videos On My Dual Core 2.8GHz AMD A64 I Can Transcode A 720P MPEG4 In About 30 Minutes Not Bad For A Lower-End Machine.

 

[hella-d]

Ok, Mabey Not Faster, But It Still Dosent Stop My PC From Playing A Movie,Transcoding The Video, AND Playing WOW (World Of Warcraft) At The Same Time, All Nice And Smooth, Try Doing That With Your Average Dual-Core Alone

 

[Guest]

When the differences in picture quality are so subtle (as in your test), you cannot rely on comparing two images with jpeg compression. You should at least put up a link with some uncompressed images (like tiff)for the sake of the readers, so we can compare the images with a more objective approach. Jpeg takes the quality down and in such a small difference between images, this can give a wron picture.

 

[bunz_of_steel]

I would like to see how or if this card would improve render times using NLE's. Not something so limiting as just encoding an HD file. Shows promise but lets keep going.

 

[techguy911]

Its alot of money for this if you have a good video card ie gtx 280 like i have using badaboom is blazing fast on my system's gpu so fast it really shaves off a huge amount of time compared this thing.

 

[kelemvor4]

Seems silly to write an article like this and not pit it against CUDA/GPGPU encoding. If a person is serious enough about encoding to consider a $200 addon card, they probably gave up cpu based encoding for cuda long ago.

I hope the reviewer reads the multitude of similar comments and either revises the review or writes an entirely new review.

 

[invlem]

Nice too see that there are still new products entering the market.

Like many other people here I'd like to see a comparison between this and Cuda both quality and time wise.

Now if we could load up more than one of these, I'd definitely see a huge advantage considering how small this card is, packing 4 geforce or radeon cards means getting a monster PSU and case to boot.

You could toss 4 of these WinFast cards into a regular sized case without problems.

 

[intelliclint]

[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]I don't agree. There have always been specialized cards for certain segments of the population. In the video arena especially there have been realtime editing cards for years, but that hasn't stopped CPUs from getting faster and faster, and it hasn't stopped desktop video from getting better and better.The PxVC1100 was never intended for the mass market, but for encoding enthusiasts there's a lot of value here. This is a fringe product, and a good one from where I'm standing. But I don't see the market being significant enough to push the CPU or graphics card manufacturers to change their roadmaps or affect the populace in general.[/citation]

Indeed there have been always specialized cards and should be. My video capture card has mpeg-2 encoder hardware that can be used with the linear video editing software that came with it. This opens the video encoding market a little more and as compaines see a demand for a niche market they try change it in a way to bring it to the masses. Even a discreate graphic chipset has better floating point preformance then integer based CPU, thus advent of MMX of SSE instructions to off load work to the FPU.

Ohh and DX 10 cards can support DirectCompute not just DX 11 cards but you do need DX 11 api installed and proper driver support.

 

[ananymouse]

Great article!

Shame the device is limited to just a few formats, with not that many options. Odd that it comes with older software - since Corel Video Studio will soon be up to version 13.

Until CUDA works for basic encoding, rather than on just a few filters and effects, and until the problems with ATI Stream are sorted out, this is probably the only game in town. The lack of wider codec support will severly limit sales.

 

[fwupow]

I do quite a bit of video encoding to DivX and would jump on this card, but near as I can tell, it only works with specific software and only encodes to specific formats. That's where the makers of this product dropped the ball. They aren't gonna sell even half as many of these as they could have, if they had finished the job (ALL software, ALL codecs).

 

[kelemvor4]

[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]I wanted to, but we can't! Please read page 4:"Note that we chose to benchmark the system with a GeForce GTX 260 graphics card installed. This is because we had originally hoped to compare the GeForce's CUDA abilities to the CPU and PxVC1100. Unfortunately, we learned that the CUDA enhancements in TMPGEnc. 4.0 Xpress are limited to video filters and cannot simply be employed to accelerate format-to-format video transcoding. Because if this, we left CUDA filter acceleration out of our testing as we're interested in focusing on hardware transcoding value."[/citation]
I do lots of encoding. If you eliminated cuda because that particular software wouldn't support it, then you should have eliminated the software. Nobody who is serious about encoding would use the CPU to do it these days; and at this price point, this device is surely ONLY targeted at serious encoders (and people with too much money, not enough knowledge about what they're buying). I implore you to add cuda benchmarks to your review even if you have to use different software.

 

[mlopinto2k1]

Why cant AMD or Intel include co-processors like this on their chips? They should have a few DOZEN of them. Jeez. So, so, so ridiculous. The Amiga 2000 had adapter cards and co-processors... it is now 20 years later. They are still doing the SAME THING?

 

[mariushm]

It's disappointing to see Tomshardware didn't bother to test another software video encoder, besides TMPEG Express.
You see, this software is not known for speed, optimizations, image quality and a lot of other factors.

Pretty much all people doing serious encoding use x264, an open source encoder that's highly optimized and offers very good image quality.
It also offers various presets of quality vs speed, from "very fast" to "extremely slow", so I can bet if you were to set x264 to the quality settings the hardware encoding card uses, it would leave it behind in both speed AND quality.

I don't see anywhere a mention of how long the sequence is, it's only mentioned the resolution (720x480) and that's a 360 MB file... Based on this, my guess the bitrate would be around 2200 kbps for video + audio , so that would mean the clip is about 25 minutes in length... with x264 you can encode it to MPEG 4 AVC such file in about 10 minutes on a Q6600 at fast presets, maybe 15 minutes at default quality settings.

Of course, if you want extremely high quality (which this hardware encoder card can't do as it's locked to certain settings) the encoder can encode the video at 0.5 - 3 fps and retains the maximum of quality possible. The card as it needs certain settings is pretty much useless to anyone who wants to do more than transcoding videos to upload on their iPhones or iPods - it would certainly not be able to produce Blu-Ray compatible streams for example, which x264 can.