CUDA?? How to get it working etc? I'm stumped!!!

valve90210 · 23 Mar 2012 at 09:18

Hi All

Yesterday whilst browsing the forums I saw a thread about encoding video and someone suggested Freemake as a good piece of software so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

WHen I saw it was CUDA enabled I was intrigued as I ave heard that it can make quite a difference with encoding times.

Last night I gave it a try and in the options clicked a tick box for it to use CUDA, and set it to re-encode a cideo from MKV to avi. There was no visible sign that CUDA was being used and the speed seemed pretty normal.

I tried googling to see if there was an easy way to see if CUDA was working but didn't find anything.

I did however stumble across a forum post where someone mentioend having used PC Wizard to check their pc was CUDA capable.

I downloaded PC Wizard and had a look, as I thought, my Graphics card (Geforce 570) is indeed CUDA enabled but when it came to the benchmarking for CUDA it got a score of 0, which baffled me a bit.

I have the latest Nvidia drivers and all seems to be well with the pc but I'm a bit stumped by CUDA and from a good bit of googling I really didn't find anything very useful about how to get it working etc

Can anyone point me in the right direction for a simple tutorial about getting it working, or does anyone know if there is a simple way of telling if it's working? Or can anyone explain why my CUDA score was 0 on the PC Wizard benchmarking?

Thanks in advance...

valve90210 · 23 Mar 2012 at 14:26

Seems I'm not the only person who has no idea...

valve90210 · 23 Mar 2012 at 17:27

Do you reckon it may well be working then? If so it doesn't seem to make a huge amount of difference to my encoding times... Ho hum, was worth a look.

valve90210 · 24 Mar 2012 at 22:29

Mattus said:
If you wanted to see if it was working, you could download a program which shows you the GPU utilisation (like EVGA Precision), and see if it increases during encoding?

Good plan, didn't really know about such software but yes, will give that a go!

smithy83 said:
it could be that cuda can only be used in certain tasks?

i have just downloaded freemake myself and when converting to avi i get about 60% to 80% gpu utilization but if i convert to dvd it wont use any of my gpu

hmmm, will have to do some experimenting!

valve90210 · 27 Mar 2012 at 13:10

Going by EVA precision it seems that CUDA was working as my graphics card usage leapt up when the CUDA option was ticked.

As to how much of a difference it made speedwise Im not sure as I didn't do any proper comparisons but it seemed like it was much the same pace as the cpu really.

Re videos being choppy with freemake, again, not really used it more than a couple of times, I just saw it mentioned in a thread here.