GPU video encode (Badaboom) first impressions.

ImperfectLink

ImperfectLink

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 10, 2005
Messages
327
Today I decided to give GPU video encoding a whirl and here are my results:

Matrix 1 VIDEO_TS > iPhone H264 480x320 @ 960kbits/sec

1st run was in Handbrake:
~18mins

2nd run was in Badaboom beta 0.9:
~13.5mins

Quality is subjectively the same and filesize is similar (Badaboom didnt crop the video or it would be the same). Audio was in sync in both files and black level looked the same on this screen. Badaboom did leave a ETI watermark on there too but I don't think that would hurt performance.

Hardware used:
Intel Q9550 @ 3.8GHZ
Asus Rampage Formula
8GB ram @ 1081
BFG GTX280 OC2 (650mhz)

Both times are nothing to sneeze at but the GPU isnt reaching the advertised performance. I can't say that I'm disappointed, but I don't know whether the difference is enough to warrant the amount of money they want for Badaboom. What do you guys think and what are your experiences?

Xen.

PS. I have 25 more runs of Badaboom til the beta expires. Let me know if there are any quick tests you might like to see.
 
Maybe it would be good to compare times of scenes with heavy motion and lots of colors and a scene with not much going on.
 
I tried it a few weeks ago, encoded a full dvd movie (Django) into psp-compatible mp4. it was over an hour and badaboom was stuck at 99%. tried it again 2 more times, same result. I think it took 36minutes to reach 99% progress. Handbrake 0.91 finished in under 45 minutes for me.

Also, cpu usage was around 50% on both cores (stock E6700) while encoding with badaboom, and GPU temps went from 55C idle to 58C. I thought the video card was supposed to do all the heavy lifting, so I was wondering about the high cpu usage. I used an evga 8800GTS 640 nothing OC'd.

How much were they charging for it anyway? Just curious.
 
I think its supposed to be 100 bones.
450: besides a different resolution (ie. native dvd) I dont know how that would really make much different a comparison for cpu vs. gpu.
Graedus: I forgot to check my gpu temp and usage while all this was going on. Was more interested in the bottom line. For my initial test, I didn't see any crashes for either app.
 
Badaboom has been a BadaPOS in my experience. I have never gotten it to fully encode a file that was not supplied as a sample by NVIDIA.
 
I would love to see it struggling with some high resolution video if possible :)
 
So far managed to transcode all 3 of the movies I've tried. I'll try native res later when i get home.
 
So I tested out the featurette vob and encoded to 1280x720 using h264 as well and came up with the following:

Handbrake : ~17mins
Badaboom : ~8mins

So there is a bit of advantage to GPU encoding at higher end resolutions apparently.
 
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