GPU Transcoding Throwdown: Elemental's Badaboom vs. AMD's Avivo Video Converter
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on December 15, 2008 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
We're happy to see AMD including ATI Stream in their latest driver release. It's great that both NVIDIA and AMD are doing what they can to advance GPU computing right now. We still won't see any truly major strides made in consumer level applications until we have OpenCL and DirectX 11 to bring hardware agnostic general purpose data parallel programming to the masses, but getting tools (even proprietary ones) out there and in the hands of developers will definitely help.
We feel similarly about the marketability of ATI Stream as we do about CUDA. GPU computing is still only a niche and there aren't enough applications out there that really bring the kind of value to the consumer that we want and expect. The decision about which graphics card you are going to pick up shouldn't come down to ATI Stream and CUDA unless you are really into one of the applications out there that runs on one or both of these technologies. For the average gamer, we definitely recommend making your purchasing decisions on how hardware performs in the games you want to play.
All that said, we are very disappointed with AMD's Avivo video converter as a vehicle to show off ATI Stream. It is a poor application that provides little to no value in exchange for the immense frustration end users will have when trying to transcode video. It is not worth the time to it takes to download or the space it takes up on your hard drive.
In the course of evaluating Avivo, our second look at Badaboom showed us a much better product than we previewed that adequately fills a niche and provides good support for getting video on to an iPod or iPhone quickly.
Badaboom 1.1 shows Elemental's commitment to the cause. Normally when I'm promised that things will get better, and that features will be added, they don't. Or if they do, they take a long time. It is now less than four months since we first previewed Badaboom and with version 1.1, much of what we asked for has been included. There's still a long way to go and Elemental still has the difficult tasks of matching the quality of established codecs like x264 and MainConcept, but these past two revisions of Badaboom prove one thing: Elemental is serious and willing to listen to feedback.
No matter how you slice it though, Elemental has a much better product than AMD is offering with the Avivo video converter.
The 8.12 drivers in general do offer some fixes for problems we've had since October. Many of our readers noticed the string of somewhat negative jabs we took at Catalyst over the past few months. We'll spare everyone a redux, but just because this driver is more stable, feature complete, and includes some important outstanding hotfixes doesn't mean the problems AMD has with their approach to driver development have been solved. The train wreck that has been the last few months of Catalyst has happened before and it will happen again as long as AMD puts too many resources into pushing drivers out every month and not enough into making sure those drivers are of high enough quality.
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GPU encoding is not supported by Vista 64-bit at this time. So if Vista 64-bit is being used that would explain why it was CPU based.This is straight from the 8.12 release notes: "The ATI Avivo video transcoder does not currently use GPU acceleration under Windows Vista 64-bit edition."
Now with that said under Vista x64 I do not get nearly the same amount of corruption as seen on the review but I do get it. Hopefully those bugs are worked out in the future.
I can successfully encode any VCD/SVCD MPEG to iPod size without a single issue. DivX files encode down to iPod size with some video corruption although it appears that the better the DivX encode the less corruption I get the in the iPod file. Xvid files just dump out audio with no video. I can't even try to covert an h.264/x264 based MKV file as Avivo doesn't recognize the container.
Hopefully ATI addresses these issues quickly.
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
Wow, good catch. There was some mention of using Vista 32bit on a few encodes, but I have to wonder if they were using Vista 64bit during the timed run.DerekWilson - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
We used 32-bit for everything but those 64-bit stills. AMD didn't tell us about the issues with 64-bit until we brought them up with them, so we switched half way through.All the performance tests were done on 32-bit vista.
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
Thanks for the clarification, Derek.nissen - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
Is it Badaboom 1.0 you are using when talking about cpu usage? because here on my duo e6600/gtx280 badaboom eats just between 10-20% of the cpu depending on input ( ~15 for 1080i h264, ~20 for dvd ) , definatly something wrong.MojaMonkey - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
On page 7 you have the 9800 GTX+ outperforming the GTX 260 is this correct or have you got the labels wrong?I'd expect the GTX 260 to perform better than a GTX+
dvinnen - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
"And since when is video transcoding not a deterministic process?"Cool product from AMD and I'm sure it will get better over the coming months, but how do you manage to do that? Weird.
The Preacher - Saturday, December 20, 2008 - link
Ever heard of dithering? If you use that and seed the random generator using system time (not really a bright idea) you could get slightly different results each time (I doubt you could actually SEE the difference).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dithering">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dithering