X1800XT knuser X2 4800+ i video enkoding

[guezz]

Hvis ATI i tillegg kan forbedre IQ til deinterlacingen vil Avivo være svært lovende.

 

Det er enda usikkert om nVidia kommer til å inkludere en slik funksjon i PureVideo.

 

Extreme Tech

 

Avivo Transcode in Action

 

We got our hands on a very early beta version of the Avivo Transcode app. In its current form, it's just a very simple stand-alone wizard. You choose your input file, pick an output profile, select a bit rate, and hit "start."

 

Picture

 

The application only works with X1000 series graphics cards, and it only ever will. That's the only architecture with the necessary features to do GPU-accelerated video transcoding well.

 

So how fast is it? We shouldn't get into serious benchmarks while the application is in such an early state, but just to give you a taste of the numbers, we ran a few tests. Our test machine was an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ with 1 GB of very low latency RAM and a Radeon X1800 XT graphics card. We encoded a test clip from the movie The Rock,—a4-minute and 50-second clip that tends to be very tough on encoders. It's the same one we use in our CPU benchmarks.

 

Encoding this nearly 5-minute clip, at DVD resolution, takes about 2 minutes 17 seconds with DivX 6, with single-pass encoding at 1 megabit. Windows Media Encoder can produce a high-quality single-pass transcode to WMV9 at 1 megabit in about 4:35. Windows Movie Maker 2 takes a few quality shortcuts to produce a DVD resolution clip at 1.5 megabits in 2:05. That's all pretty good: This is, after all, one of the fastest CPUs money can buy, paired with very fast RAM.

 

How fast does ATI's new Avivo Transcode app get it done? Try 24 seconds! Okay, that's "give or take a second," because the MPEG-4 profile finished a 1-megabit encode in 23 seconds, the MPEG-2 and Windows Media Video 9 profiles were done in 24, and the DVD profile at 6 megabits finished in 25 seconds. That's all at the default full resolution, too. Crunching down the output resolution by choosing the "WMV9 for PMC (Portable Media Center)" profile at 700 kilobits per second completed the job in 17 seconds.

 

That's right; we're look at a minimum of 5-to-1 speed improvement over CPU transcoding speed. That's just huge.

The Avivo Transcode app as it stands now is little more than a tech demo, really. It doesn't touch audio, which is a real problem for many transcoding jobs. It doesn't join separate video and audio files. You can't adjust resolution but are stuck with whatever resolution is part of the profile you select. There are lots of quality options missing—no two-pass encoding, quarter pixel, bi-directional, etc. You can't type in an arbitrary bit rate, but are simply given a slider with a range of values.

 

Of course, it's very early. Sources tell us that ATI is busy cranking away on this app, with current plans for a release before the end of the year. The company hasn't confirmed whether it will include the app as part of the Catalyst Control Center or deliver it as a standalone program. Currently the company is working on additional features and profiles, including profiles for the PSP, video iPod, and H.264 encoding. We don't know what the program will look like upon release; its usefulness will depend on ATI's ability to add in some basic missing features.

 

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The current Avivo Transcode beta application is certainly very early, and lacks the necessary features to make it a tool that could be used regularly. Perhaps the final version will be a useful tool, perhaps not; we simply can't say at this time. Regardless of the feature set of the application, the early version has shown us that GPU-accelerated video transcoding is real, and it holds absolutely amazing potential. Does Nvidia have a similar project up its sleeve? We haven't heard of one, but we wouldn't be at all surprised if it were developing one, since neither company can ever let the other have a feature without playing "me-too."

[HilRam]

WOW!

 

500% økning! Det er jo helt hårreisende! Det blir spennende å se om dette blir en "plug-in" til etablert software eller en selvstendig applikasjon. Her er det mulig å spare mye på CPU, ja!