Can I offload video encoding to a 8800GTX?

R

RooK

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 19, 2001
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I've got a new sandybridge build, and it runs great with my GTX 470.

However I have a 8800GTX that is doing nothing... I like to stream games to justin.tv and it would be awesome if I could offload the process to the 8800GTX...

Can/does anyone know the right direction to look? The googles has done nozing for me, however I might be using the wrong key words.
 
You'd really have to check out the apps to see if they support using CUDA for encoding. I can tell you from knowledge I've been digging up all day (speccing out a build for a friend who does use AE and Premiere) that you have to do a minor hack to get Premiere CS5 to use the gpu for encoding with the older gpus; you may have to do something like that depending on whatever encoding app you're using.

I would say (quick answer) sure, you should be able to use the card for encoding; again though, it really depends on what app you're using to do the encoding.
 
i don't think the G80 gpu's have the ability to do encoding. unlike the G92, the G80 doesn't have full cuda support.
 
Well, all have cuda support, however the 8800gtx is missing quite a few hw instructions that apparently are important for video decoding, so its frequentnly not supported (video is not my area oslf specialty) . That being said, a fair amoilujtof older video transcodng and encoding apps out there with gpu support only do gpu decoding ad not gpu encoding.
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Very cool responses! I guess, I can move the question to - "What apps are available to take advantage of video card encoding offload?" That way I can move to start tweaking (if possible) to take advantage of what now is a "paperweight" to actually perform a function.

I use xsplit to cast, however I would need an application that takes advantage of the GPU's core, then add that source into xsplit.

Ideas?
 
Based on the benchmarks I've seen with a sandy bridge cpu I doubt it will improve performance at all.
 
Don't bother, it's not worth it. Any modern CPU (P4 and up) can encode video with better quality in a shorter amount of time than a GPU can.
 
The basic gist of GPU-assisted or offloaded video encoding so far regardless of it being Nvidia CUDA technology or ATI/AMD Avivo technology is: they all suck, period.

There isn't an encoder out there that can get the job done with any level of quality that approaches the basic x264 encoder for creating h.264 content, or any other format either for that matter. The most popular CUDA-based encoder of that type is Badaboom, which is still around, and even years later after they created it the damned thing - even when set for the best possible quality settings as a tradeoff against the potential speed benefits - still creates encodes that simply look like utter shit. ;)

Someday we'll get a proper h.264 content creation encoder, hopefully a GPU-assisted version of x264 but, from what I've read at the developer blogs for that encoder it's just not currently a workable solution. You're still better off with a quad/hex core box (or dual quad/hex if you're independently wealthy or whatever) and doing it the old fashioned way with x264 or whatever encoder you favor for whatever format you're shooting for.
 
+1 to what Joe said.

Yeah, GPU-based encoders, especially for H.264 are severely lacking in quality. CPU-based encoders do a much nicer job.

One of the many reasons that the GPU-encoder was dropped from Premiere Pro CS4 to CS5. It was expensive, required a Quadro, and the videos turned out like shit.
 
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