GPU or CPU encoding?

[imamosher]

I know its possible to encode using your GPU as opposed to CPU but surely the CPU is quicker especially if the software utilizes quad core?

 

[Mr Paul]

No, the GPU is many faster

 

[toxicredcat]

GPU generally is a bit quicker but software is rather limited IMO so I prefer to use the CPU. I think it was a review of a 5870 I was reading where it compared GPU rendering times and it was something like 10 seconds faster than an i7.

 

[imamosher]

I have no idea how that can be, care to elaborate? Does the GPU have more processing power. Any idea what software I would use to encode with that would utilize the GPU instead of the CPU?


As in sig I'm just wondering if the GPU would be quicker than the CPU?
thanks

 

[UKDTweak]

The ATI software is called AVIVO, you have to download it and install it, then open CCC in BASIC mode and the option to Encode is there, but it is Very limited...

http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/ati-avivo-hd/Pages/ati-avivo-hd.aspx

 

[imamosher]

by the sounds of it, there isnt much in it speed wise and perhaps better to go for a more feature rich software at the cost of a few minutes of encode time.

 

[Mr Paul]

I have no idea how that can be, care to elaborate? Does the GPU have more processing power. Any idea what software I would use to encode with that would utilize the GPU instead of the CPU?


As in sig I'm just wondering if the GPU would be quicker than the CPU?
thanks

Yes the GPU has much more parallel processing power than a quad core CPU.

Software would depend on what GPU you have.

 

[Odhran]

The CPU has must more instruction sets than the GPU, which is specialised to graphics algorithms. They are both CISC chips though. It's just that the smaller / more compact instruction set of the GPU means that you can fit more parallel units onto a chip than your typical CPU.

So the answer is what exactly do you want to do? If you're looking for the fastest way to process a query from a relational database then it's a CPU you need. If you want to work with some heavy matrix transformations then you're probably faster with a GPU.

 

[Odhran]

Oh hang on ... just noticed you mentioned "encoding" ... presumably you mean video encoding (or transcoding). I've seen a demo of ffmpeg running CUDA on nvidia and trouncing an i7 doing the same job. So maybe that answers your question.

 

[imamosher]

Basically looking to encode avi files to either dvd format or any other format, was just wondering if it would be quicker doing it with the GPU or the CPU in my sig.

 

[Mr Paul]

GPU

 

[Blackbadger]

Use handbreak a free app using the cpu.

Unfortunately although gpu's have the potential to be good at video encoding, the software solutions are poor/immature. So for now cpu based solutions provide a better solution.