Badaboom: A Full Test of Elemental's GPU Accelerated H.264 Transcoder
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 18, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Energy Efficiency
The Badaboom transcoding process actually taxes the CPU as well as the GPU as we’ve already seen, so it’s not too surprising that power consumption when you’re using the GPU as well as the CPU is actually greater than when it’s all CPU based.
The factor you have to take into account is not only how much power is consumed by the system, but for what duration. While the Core 2 Quad Q9450 system only drew about 160W, the entire encode task took 211 seconds. The same system with a GeForce GTX 280 performing the transcode finished the task in 61.9 seconds despite drawing 210W at the wall. Multiply the two out and you get total energy consumed in Joules:
| Instantaneous Power Consumption | Energy Use over Benchmark Duration | |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 | 160W | 33760J |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 | 210W | 12999J |
While offloading the transcode task to the GeForce GTX 280 takes more power, it uses less than 40% of the energy since it can complete the transcode so much faster. GPU accelerated video transcode appears to be, as we first suspected, the more efficient way of doing things.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
38 Comments
View All Comments
JarredWalton - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Wait... did you just talk about clean code and Cyberlink with a straight face!? I think every new version of PowerDVD gets worse, and I've had way too many difficulties with Blu-ray playback and their software (especially the OEM bundled version). Still, maybe they'll get it right with the ATI transcoding. And maybe I'll win the lottery.... :-)prodystopian - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Mike Lowry: ...It's a Limited Edition.Marcus Burnett: You d*mn right it's limited. No cup holder, no back seat...
Yes, I registered to post this.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
ahh, I love that movie. Too bad the sequel was such a letdown.10 points to you my friend :)
-A
Manabu - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
You used too slow profiles. Acording to the handbrake site (http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/BuiltInPresets)">http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/BuiltInPresets), the Blind profile should be 4 times faster than the iPhone profile used here. Then, an quadcore leaves the GTX 280 smoking behind. The quality should be then comparable.Further discussion of this new encoder, inclusive by x264 developers: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136847">http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136847
mongoosesRawesome - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
Anand compares an x264 setting that is higher quality than badaboom's. He should have stopped right there, but instead he publishes numbers that show that badaboom is faster.You can't compare speeds if they aren't of similar quality!
thebackwash - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
I must admit I never understood the consumer desire for anything more than reasonable multimedia encoding times. If I buy a new movie, and want to rip it to my computer, I only have to do it *once.* To some, any speedup they can get is well worth the price, but I honestly don't care how long it takes, as long as it's less than, say overnight, or even overnight plus whatever extra time it needs until I get home from work the next day.I understand the desire for faster computation of tasks that involve a lot of user interaction: games, web browsing, office applications, and basically the whole lot of interactive GUI-driven programs, but I never saw the draw of blazingly fast set-it-and-forget-it type computations. I can leave the computer on overnight to perform a task if need be. I personally care about quality, and whether the file can be played back in real time on the target platform. File size is important, too, but with 1TB hard drives coming in at about $125, that has started to matter a lot less.
While I *do* understand why this could provide enormous benefit to professionals working with video, any consumer of DVD movies or amateur videographer should be more than happy with what we have now. I don't see the outcry for faster word processors, and that's because computers perform that function well enough to be usable by consumers or amateurs for whom time is *not* money when it comes to using their computers.
I must admit though, I can take a chill pill and leave the computer for days at a time, as long as my RSS reader catches the daily web updates, so I might not be the average reader of tech sites.
(Once it took my old iBook *ten* days to compile KDE 3.5 from source!)
icrf - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Well, transcoding to a master high quality copy for long term storage, maybe. But when you want to take those with you on a portable device, you have to transcode. I'm not a fan of having multiple copies of things, despite the cost of hard drives, so I'd much rather a way to speedily convert that for me.My problem is I want to convert in bulk, which means either a nice job manager in your GUI, or a documented CLI for the app.
LTG - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Does it support 2-pass encoding?Does it encode uncompressed AVI?
Did they say if Main profile is coming, or if it's stuck like that?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
There are no options to control the number of passes the encoder does, this is simply a single-pass transcode that can happen in greater than real time depending on your GPU.Depending on the format of the video stream it may be able to support it.
Elemental is considering adding Main profile support to Badaboom, but right now it's reserved for the Premier plugin.
-A
erikejw - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Good article otherwise.If you gonna sit all day and code 100 movies or whatever this is the appropriate way to calculate energy consumption.
If not you have to include the extra seconds when your computer sit idle and the cpu transcode finishes.
This is how they do when they calculate server energy consumptin.
It is not like the computer instantly go down to 0 w when the coding is done.