Facts and Fiction of GPU-Based H.264 Encoding

notthatwillsmith writes "We've all heard a lot of big promises about how general-purpose GPU computing can greatly accelerate common tasks that are slow on the CPU — like H.264 video encoding. Maximum PC compared the GPU-accelerated Badaboom app to Handbrake, a popular CPU-based encoder. After testing a variety of workloads ranging from archival-quality DVD rips to transcodes suitable for play on the iPhone, Maximum PC found that while Badaboom is significantly faster than X264-powered Handbrake in a few tests that require video resizing, it simply can't compare to the X264-powered Handbrake for archival-quality DVD backups."

Comments

Obvious

[evilviper]

This is the most obvious and boring insight they could possibly offer... Everyone with the slightest interest knows this already.

The low quality of hardware-based video encoder cards is a very well-known fact, and those MPEG encoders cards are just ASICs on a PCI card, almost exactly the same hardware as your video card.

The point of offering up APIs for GPUs, and AMD's attempt to integrate the GPU ASIC with the CPU via HyperTransport, is aimed at improving things, however.

x264 does a good job because it's an open source project, with several skilled and interested individuals continually tweaking the code to improve quality and performance. Once hardware-based video encoding routines aren't hidden in closed-source firmware on a dedicated card, the same development effort can step up and improve HARDWARE encoding now, exactly as they have with software.

Not only can quality be significantly improved, you can expect performance to improve significantly as well, even with greater quality. The initial implementation of any codec is always relatively poor performing, and low quality, so this wouldn't even be an insightful observation if it was comparing x264 with any other software based encoder... The only difference is that a new software h.264/AVC encoder would be SLOWER than x264, as well as being much lower quality.