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ATI Stream Technology Cuts Video Transcoding Time in Half

explicit4u

explicit4u

explicit4u

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DailyTech said:
Video enthusiasts and media corporations alike will be looking very closely at ATI video cards

ATI, the graphics division of AMD, has been working to spread its Stream GPGPU technology, which helps speed up applications by exploiting the parallel nature of its GPU products. Since ATI is a part of AMD, Stream has been designed to work with the CPU, instead of exclusively offloading all work onto the GPU. Signal processing, financial analysis, and protein modeling are just some of the fields that Stream can help.

Video transcoding is one of the most CPU intensive tasks, especially when converting high definition video. ATI has been working on this problem for a while, and has released its ATI Video Converter which can use Stream technology. UVD2 Fast Decode and GPU Scaling will be available for the entire Radeon HD 4000 series of graphics cards. GPU encoding in parallel stages will not be available in 45xx and 43xx cards due to bandwidth limitations, but all other 4000 series cards support it as well.

ATI is partnering with Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to use Stream's transcoding framework. One of the first out is CyberLink, which is leveraging ATI's Unified Video Decoder (UVD) in its MediaShow Espresso video converter application. This allows it to quickly convert digital video files for use on portable devices like Apple's iPhone and Sony PSP. CyberLink has also optimized its PowerDirector 7 video editing software to take advantage of ATI Stream.

Tests conducted by ATI showed a reduction in transcoding time of at least 50% in most applications. For example, a 94 second 1920x1080 video encoded at 24 frames per second using H.264 took 131 seconds to transcode to a format suitable for the iPhone using just the CPU. It took just 46 seconds using a mid-range Radeon HD 4670 video card, reducing the time needed by almost 65%. Results would be even more dramatic using a higher end Radeon 4870 or Radeon 4890 GPU. Addition GPUs through CrossFire would provide even greater performance improvements.

Support is currently supplied by a hotfix to Catalyst 9.5, version 8.612.3 RC2 dated May 25. Full support will be included in Catalyst 9.6, which will be released in mid-June.
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thegoonden said:
Isn't that sweet, ATI have cloned badaboom and claimed it as new.
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But the AVIVO encoder was around in early 2006 for the X1900 series of cards. :confused:
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/video/avivo_1.html

Also it's free. But apparently it's crap (although the review I'm basing this opinion on is ancient - the picture quality issue might be resolved by now). Either way I don't really care as to be frank I don't watch movies on my PC very often, let alone transcode them to every format known to man. Also ATi compared their 4670 to a 9500 GT which we already know is a fairly large gap in computational performance which is a bit dubious in itself. It'd be a better comparison to compare with a 9600 GSO (G92) or something.
 
looks really good! and that bit about ati cloning badaboom? :S lolz!! i think its more like bababloop cloned from ati's software, which lightnix said, has been going since 2006. oh, and its free
 


I've been waiting for ATI to get their STREAM technology better adopted, kudos to nVidia for getting CUDA pushed out there which in turn gave AMD/ATI the wake up call to be more pro-active with their STREAM tech.

I'm a GPGPU nOOb still but I bought a used nVidia 8800GT to play with CUDA and the results were positive, now all we need is AMD/ATI to make stream a viable competitor to CUDA and the fun can begin! . . . I mean the ATI cards have a massive amount of stream processors waiting to be tapped! :eek:

Lightnix said:
Also it's free. But apparently it's crap (although the review I'm basing this opinion on is ancient - the picture quality issue might be resolved by now). Either way I don't really care as to be frank I don't watch movies on my PC very often, let alone transcode them to every format known to man
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I think there is a lot more to ATI Stream than just Video Encoding/Transcoding, once you get general tasks that require a huge amount of Processing running on a GPU the resulting speedup can be quite suprising.

Was this the review you referring to?

GPU Transcoding Throwdown: Elemental's Badaboom vs. AMD's Avivo Video Converter
Anandtech - December 15th, 2008
 
OpenCL is the way forward :)

NVIDIA themselves are pushing it towards researchers almost as strongly as they are CUDA.

Once we have a unified GPGPU programming standard, and lets face it, there should be, after all we use OpenGL on both NVIDIA and ATI cards! Then good GPGPU techniques should start to make it into mainstream apps with some very nice results.

personally I think a lot of benefit will come from underlying libraries adopting appropriate GPGPU techniques, physics libraries, maths libraries etc.
 
LOL big LOL

They compare the 4670 against the 9500GT and crow how its cut times in half...

Thats like comparing an 8800GT against a 4870... you could have bought 2x 9500GT for the price of a 4670 (roughly) and got very similiar performance.
 
i'll believe it when i see it. avivo turned out to be sooo great, and all the noise made in december when they added stream support to catalyst.
 
I'm very pleased to see that ATi are taking on the CUDA capabilities of the Nvidia cards. If not just so that ATi owners can have this functionality from their cards.

Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, the 4670 vs 9500 comparison is an unbalanced one. Here, Legit reviews do a comparison between the 9800GTX+, 4770 and i7 965.

h264_corei7.jpg


http://www.legitreviews.com/article/978/3/

So the Nvidia solution is a fair bit faster, as is the i7...... BUT ..........the cpu load on the ATi solution is considerably lower which is very important because it shows that ATi have an area to work on and also that the machine is still very usable during the encoding process. Having said that the CPU was only at around 64% while encoding with CUDA so it's fair to say that machine would be very usable too. More importantly thus means that with a slower CPU the ATi solution is faster as the CPU isn't a bottleneck.

h264_4850e.jpg


http://www.legitreviews.com/article/978/2/

What's great about this for me is that I will be able to boost my encoding time considerably, something that I do a lot of, without having to buy an i7. :)
 
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Hey Wolvers, thanks for the link to that article. Looks very promising for those interested in transcoding using either companies' cards. It's good that there's a company catering for both sides - cyberlink get epic props for that of course. :)
 
osullivanpt said:
I have the latest drivers and the hot fix but i still can't enable Stream in MediaShow Espresso, does anybody have it working?
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How do you know that it's not working?

Lightnix said:
Hey Wolvers, thanks for the link to that article. Looks very promising for those interested in transcoding using either companies' cards. It's good that there's a company catering for both sides - cyberlink get epic props for that of course. :)
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I just wish they'd add full CUDA support to TMPGenc 4.0 Xpress. It's a much better app.
 
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