GPUs are highly parallel by definition-much more so than CPUs-and video encoding is one of those tasks that benefits greatly from parallelization.
The approach made a ton of sense, of course. Elemental’s early benchmarks showed a high-end GeForce could speed up video encoding nearly threefold compared to a dual-core Intel CPU. Using CUDA, Nvidia’s general-purpose GPU programming interface, the firm developed a program that offloaded H.264 video encoding to GeForce graphics processors.
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Then, in 2008, a small software firm called Elemental Technologies opened Pandora’s box. Encoding speeds increased slowly, in a pretty linear fashion, with the arrival of new CPUs. Improving performance meant adding more cores, ramping up clock speeds, optimizing for extra threads, and perhaps supporting some new instruction set extensions. Once upon a time, video encoding was the realm of the microprocessor. Read on to see our findings.Ī brief history of hardware video transcoders We also took into account file sizes, to see if any of the encoders took shortcuts, and power consumption, to determine which solutions were the most energy efficient.
We also looked at the image quality of the output files, cranking out a flurry of screenshots and hunching over our screens to discern even minute visual differences. We then tested all of that gear in a trio of major video conversion utilities: CyberLink’s MediaEspresso, ArcSoft’s MediaConverter, and a special build of Handbrake with an OpenCL-accelerated x264 encoder.Īs part of our testing, we compared encoding times for the various hardware acceleration options in each program. So, we whipped together an Ivy Bridge system and outfitted it with graphics cards featuring AMD’s and Nvidia’s latest dedicated transcoding hardware. Those questions have nagged us for a long time, and we wanted to answer them. Which encoder is the fastest? Which one offers the best image quality? Is all conversion software created equal? And there are lingering questions about image quality.
Users may find themselves having to choose between, say, the QuickSync logic in their Intel processor, the VCE logic in their shiny new Radeon, and good old software encoding. Because both CPUs and GPUs come with their own dedicated transcoding logic, some systems offer multiple paths to hardware acceleration. Vendors of video conversion software are working hard to support them all.įor everyday users and even enthusiasts, making sense of that jungle of disparate offerings can be tough. These days, every new GeForce, Radeon, A-series APU, and Core processor has some sort of hardware transcoding mojo. That is, we’ve seen a surge in the availability of graphics cards and processors that can decode and subsequently re-encode compressed video, whether using GPU shaders or dedicated transcoding logic. Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed the meteoric rise of hardware-accelerated video transcoding.
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