Does the Graphics card play a part in video encoding?

[lionelblair]

Hi Guys

Just bought a new mobo, cpu, and ram. Want to see if I can get these blu-ray coversions into wmv9 down from the 20 hours it currently takes!

My question is someone mentioned that you can now utilise the memory onboard your video card to speed up the encoding process. Surely the bulk of video encoding is done by the cpu? I've just upgraded from a AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core overclocked to 2.2ghz, to a whopping AMD Phenom II X4 Black Edition running 3ghz. Suffice to say I'll be overclocking that bad boy to 3.4!

Cheers
Mark

[Blue_MiSfit]

Hello,

The short answer: The GPU is not directly involved in the encoding process.

The more complicated answer: There are certain workflows that can benefit from a powerful GPU. However, these workflows perform specialized tasks, like using the GPU to decode and deinterlace a source, or using the GPU to denoise a source. The real heavy lifting (encoding the video) is still pure CPU. Sure, there are products out there like Baddaboom - but their quality simply sucks, to be perfectly honest :)

Your Phenom II X4 will like x264 very much, especially when overclocked to 3.4GHz.

Any reason in particular you're using WMV9 (VC-1) over H.264? What software do you use to generate your WMV9 encodes?

~MiSfit

[LoRd_MuldeR]

It depends on the video encoder you are using. Most encoders, including x264, Xvid and DivX, do not involve the GPU at all. They are CPU only! It's true that there are GPU-based encoders. But at the moment "GPU accelerated" video encoding is nothing but marketing blabber. There are commercial products available (e.g "Baddaboom"), but they aren't competitive at all and that's unlikely to change soon! For decoding H.264 or VC-1 video the GPU does a fairly good job (because modern graphics cards have specialized chips for that task), but you really do not need a "high end" GPU model for that. The video decoder chip is identical for most GPU models (e.g. VP2) anyway. At the same time video encoding is highly CPU limited. So I can only recommend to not spend too much money for the GPU (unless gaming is an important topic for you) and instead spend as much money for the CPU as you can effort! RAM isn't really a limiting factor for video encoding, but it's very cheap anyway. I wouldn't run with less than 4 GB nowadays...

[lionelblair]

Thanks for the replies guys.

That's what I wanted to hear :-D. Blue_misfit I convert to wmv9 for Xbox 360 HD playback. My Blu-ray drive is in the PC which is no longer near the TV so I can't run my HDMI cable to it anymore. So now I re-encode using TMPGEnc into wmv and play them over the LAN through my Xbox - does a bloody good job actually!