GPU performance: Video Transcoding

Video Transcoding over the GPU

A new trend in GPU development is using the GPU for things other than rendering games. Parallel processing aka Stream processing. ATI uses ATI Stream and NVIDIA uses CUDA. As the topic now slowly becomes more familiar we feel that now would be a good time to start collecting data that measures the performance of the GPU while computing and crunching numbers.

One of the most definitive functions the GPU will be and can be used for, is video transcoding. So we sought an application that can transcode video files over both the CPU and GPU.

Below you can find the first results of this new test. In this test we transcode a 200 MB AVCHD 1920x1080i media file to a 1280x720P MP4 binary.

So here we see the results of GPU assisted video transcoding. The numbers are the seconds it takes to finish transcoding; the lower, the better.

Once we pop in a graphics card, the GPU assists the CPU during the transcoding process. The CPU at 3.75 GHz however is more dominant, resulting in all modern graphics card assisted results bottlenecking at roughly 30 FPS. But that's still seconds faster than NOT utilizing the graphics card.