VSO Software Forum

I recently replaced a much underpowered but surprisingly reliable HP Pavilion laptop with a i7-6700k powered desktop with all the trimmings. For now, I am still using the onboard Intel HD Graphics 530 with surprisingly good results (never thought I would say that about an Intel GPU) until I buy either a Nvidia 1070 or Nvidia 1080 GPU, or more probably a third-party one based on one of these architecture, either Asus or MSI.

All that for one simple question: what to expect with this kind of hardware ?

Well... maybe two questions: is it worth it ?

To partly answer my own question... I installed a "Asus ROG Strix GTX-1060" in my computer as I could not afford a higher model. And I discovered a few peculiarities about transcoding with CUDA:

1. The NVIDIA aceleration is good only for H.264 (possibly H.265 also) encoding. If you transcode in an older format like XVid or DivX, it is totally useless.

2. You activate ONLY Nvidia NVEC accelerators, and ONLY 2 of them, as only two streams can be processed at the same time and selecting more will result in error messages.

3. You fix the max number of simultaneous decoders at two, as the third (and fourth) will be procedded by the CPU and the difference in speed is noteworthy.

4. Transcoding a Blu-Ray (1080p) with NVEC was done at 280 fps, while a transcoding with CPU only was done at 8 fps. I kind of remember that transcoding with Intel Quicksync was done at 40 fps.

5. There is no double-pass encoding. Material Encoders offer single-pass only but I found the quality quite good, in fact as good as my previous double-pass testings using CPU.

6. The most interesting result was the CPU load that dropped from 98% (CPU or QuickSync) to 25% (NVEC), that being the bottom line as Audio is always processed by the CPU.

So, is it worth it ? In my case the answer is YES, although the learning curve was a bit difficult, meaning a lot of guess and try. For fast H.264 encoding with high quality, it's a very good way to go.