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GPU accelerated Handbrake

wolvers

wolvers

wolvers

Soldato
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Finally something useful from OpenCL!! :p

I did a quick search but found nothing, and I though this might be of interest here.

There's finally OpenCL and HWD support in Handbrake. The link to these nightly builds is here;

https://build.handbrake.fr/view/OpenCL/

I just tested it out with my 1080p/High/RF20 profile and it's boosted my average fps by ~75%. Brilliant! :cool: It's still utilising 100% of my 8350 but has added 20-40% usage on my 7970, when enabling OpenCL and HWD support.

There's a couple of caveats though. Firstly there's a comment on HWD support;

* WARNING *

We've found that hardware decoding support is unreliable and triggering crashes in the graphics driver.
Since this crash is happening in the kernel space, it has the potential to crash your system to the point a reboot is necessary.

We therefor highly recommend that you do not use this on mission critical systems or environments where you could suffer a loss of work due to a spontaneous reboot.
Click to expand...

I've been trying it out this morning and it seemed OK but I'll do a full encode tonight and see if it's stable.

Secondly, it only works at stock clocks so 925Mhz on the core for me which is a huge shame. If only I could mod the UVD clock to match my 1200Mhz overclock it would add even more speed.
 
wolvers said:
Finally something useful from OpenCL!! :p

I did a quick search but found nothing, and I though this might be of interest here.

There's finally OpenCL and HWD support in Handbrake. The link to these nightly builds is here;

https://build.handbrake.fr/view/OpenCL/

I just tested it out with my 1080p/High/RF20 profile and it's boosted my average fps by ~75%. Brilliant! :cool: It's still utilising 100% of my 8350 but has added 20-40% usage on my 7970, when enabling OpenCL and HWD support.

There's a couple of caveats though. Firstly there's a comment on HWD support;



I've been trying it out this morning and it seemed OK but I'll do a full encode tonight and see if it's stable.

Secondly, it only works at stock clocks so 925Mhz on the core for me which is a huge shame. If only I could mod the UVD clock to match my 1200Mhz overclock it would add even more speed.
Click to expand...

Where have you been? this has been out for a year :p

Cyberlink
Adobe CS6
Sony Vages
vReveal

Are just a few others that use OpenCL GPU acceleration, Not to mention BitCoin mining.

OpenCL is not as dead as a lot of people think, Adobe dropped CUDA in some of their apps in favour of OpenCL, and its still expending, you will see a lot more of it :)
 
This is THE best video encoding app bar none though, and AFAIK the first for x264 to support OpenCL.

Quicksync, VCE and CUDA implementations in Arcsoft and Cyberlink are fast but these have quality issues and a cost. Handbrake is free and produces the best IQ.
 
wolvers said:
This is THE best video encoding app bar none though, and AFAIK the first for x264 to support OpenCL.

Quicksync, VCE and CUDA implementations in Arcsoft and Cyberlink are fast but these have quality issues and a cost. Handbrake is free and produces the best IQ.
Click to expand...

Like Intel's Quick Sync some CUDA apps speed things up by reducing quality.

But to be honest there is also a slight reduction in quality with Cyberlink using OpenCL, vReveal seems good but have not used that to any extent as i don't really like it, not tryed Sony Vegas yet, OpenCL in Adobe apps is good.

And yes, Handbreak is just fantastic, i use that for Youtube compression among other things, the quality with or without OpenCL is suburb. better by far than all the (pay for) apps.

HandBreak used for compression... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIG9EgRhDGc
 
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I tried GPU encoding and it all looked trash compared to traditional CPU based methods.

Slight loss in IQ is a gross understatement, huge loss of clarity in GPU encodes.
 
That's why this is a big deal IMO. Fast encoding with the high IQ you get from software x264 running on the CPU. Give it a try.

Tech Report did a good review on the IQ differences;

http://techreport.com/review/23324/a-look-at-hardware-video-transcoding-on-the-pc

Aside from slight variations in artifact patterns, it's hard to discern much of a difference between the different solutions here. That's good news. It means the OpenCL acceleration doesn't degrade image quality in a noticeable way, regardless of the hardware used.

Handbrake is the only one of our three test apps that doesn't mess with color saturation, too. Really, I'd say it has the best output, hands down.
Click to expand...

They say it should have been available 6 months ago but AFAIK it's only just appeared since the new year.
 
I gave it a go, exported my settings from old version of Handbrake I had.. then couldn't import them to directly compare :). Also noticed GPU clocks went up, but GPU usage was 0%. Dunno, went back to old stable version. 3770k is pretty quick anyway :).
 
If its anything like OpenCL usage with luxrender or bitcoin then its going to be broken under windows unless you can do the encoding purely on the GPU, the problem being that high cpu usage chokes information being sent to the GPUs causing low GPU usage, doesn't happen with Mac or Linux OpenCL drivers though, they seem to prioritise the GPU :/
 
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