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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
36 Comments
View All Comments
plonk420 - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
this review is irksome... no mention of x264 version, no mention of resolution or bitrate used on the chart. as a previous comment says, the PQ on the x264 encode looks like the resize was screwed up... the comparison to a software solution was pretty poor.plonk420 - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
http://plonkmedia.org/demo/test.html">http://plonkmedia.org/demo/test.html <-low resolution stream (zoomed 2x)http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ECOIUXQL">http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ECOIUXQL <-low resolution download
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TPJVM0Y6">http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TPJVM0Y6 <-high resolution
http://www.viddler.com/explore/plonk420/videos/1/">http://www.viddler.com/explore/plonk420/videos/1/ <-what i'm assuming is a transcode (but same site that Anandtech used)
plonk420 - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
quick and dirty tests... (emphesis on dirty; i have Opera with 30+ tabs open, uTorrent, VNC Viewer, handful of other programs open)source: Star Wars 4 VTS_02_4, 18 mins
low res: 320x128 took 310 seconds (±10 sec), processor use was ~30-40%
high res: 640x272 took 325 seconds (±10 sec), processor use was 60-70%
bicubic resizing, no cropping to exactly 2.39:1; couldn't be arsed. just used MeGUI's default iPod encoding settings, but set Quant 19. did SubME 2, 4, 5, and one test with 6 (the high res). it didn't seem to change the time it took to encode.
i'm sure you could up quality, significantly, too with better resizing options (i ususally use Lanczos4), other iPod compatible switches, at minimal speed cost. i don't usually encode for low bitrate/PMPs, but settings to do so are a google away.
but this pq looks decent to me. no issues the hardware encode had. using x264 has a BIT of a learning curve, but can be as fast as these hardware solutions (and possibly excede PQ with the proper options). recent builds have Peryn, i7, and even Phenom optimizations (that weren't utilized in one of the other site's i7 x264 tests).
my tests were encoded on a "mere" Phenom 9550 @ 2.2ghz on Vista x64 SP1, drives fragmented to hell.
options were --qp 19 --level 3 --nf --no-cabac --partitions none --merange 12 --threads auto --thread-input --progress --no-psnr --no-ssim (with --level being 1.3 for low or 3 for high, and --subme being 2, 4, 5, 6). build was 1051 (a few builds out of date; 1055 has better CAVLC PQ according to changelog)
mvrx - Monday, December 15, 2008 - link
I've been grumpy about this for years. Most all the commercial video editing packages have treated mananging and encoding 1080p as a pro-only, or "coming next year" feature.. 1080p isn't pro folks. It's consumer level.I have to use StaxRip with x264.exe encoder to do what I really want, as most commericial packages still have issues with 1080p. Everything should be ready for any resolution, including super high def. Don't try to charge customers more just because they are ready for what will be considered common in another year or two.
I'd also like to see the upconverting technolologies that HD dvd/BR players do in real time mature for software converters. I'd like to take my home movies and DVDs and convert them to 1080p, then encode to h.264. I know that doesn't give me true native quality content, I just like the idea of standardizing all my media to 1080p.
MadMan007 - Monday, December 15, 2008 - link
Thanks for keeping up with these articles. GPGPU's killer app for most consumers is video encoding. One thing that's missing from this article as was alluded to by an earlier comment is a reasonable price comparison - I'd like to see how the GPGPU encoders stack up to a dual core CPU since adding a video card is a much easier upgrade and lots of people have dual core CPU systems already.psychobriggsy - Monday, December 15, 2008 - link
It's interesting comparing this review to the Avivo vs Badaboom article I read elsewhere earlier this month (using the leaked pre-release Catalyst) where they achieved significant performance improvements over using a CPU (i.e., it was actually encoding on the GPU in that review, whereas the conclusion here is that it isn't). They didn't use a Core i7 however. Still, when it comes to using a $200 video card with a $200 CPU, or a $1000 CPU to achieve the same thing, the choice is obvious (well, when the quality is sorted out).Regardless AMD really shouldn't have released Avivo in that state, or they could have at least just called it a preview. What's wrong with AMD/ATI's developers? Don't they have any pride in their work?
bobsm1 - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
Looks like Anand is actually reviewing the products instead of taking the marketing crap that is being provided and just posting it. Takes a bit more work but the result is more interestingdaletkine - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
I used my Sapphire Toxic 4870 to convert the MPEG2 recording of Lost in Space VCR tape, to DivX using Avivo Video converter. My size went from 5.10GB to 3.48GB, from 720x480 (12Mbps) to 640x480 (converter doesn't give res options). Speed wasn't drammatic, like around 40min for 2h10min movie, on an Athlon 64 X2 @ 3.23GHz. CPU was utilized 100% and GPU was utilized (can be seen with RivaTuner) around 8-10%. Video quality was great, nothing to complain, no artifacts like anand pointed out, looks fine. So, seems to have worked for me, but not what I expected. The bad: WMV displays artifacting just like anand showed, Catalyst 8.12 drivers have issue with Xvid stuttering playback, so I saw that in WMP when playing my converted file (solved by using VLC player), no compression that I can see taking place (I used max quality setting, but medium only gives savings of 500MB, don't know about low), and it still needs a quad core.The good: it actually works for me, free, simple, good quality (when works).
This on Vista 64, 8GB ram, Athlon 64 X2 5000+ @ 3.23GHz.
Jovec - Monday, December 15, 2008 - link
8.12 Avivio just creates a 0 byte file when trying to transcode my Xvid (AutoGK) videos. Ah well...Etsp - Monday, December 15, 2008 - link
Man, that's some high level of compression. Careful with that, it may just have made an information black-hole on your hard-drive. :)