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.
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Staples - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
From the introMedical imaging and scientific analysis benefitted tremendously from GPU acceleration, but it's rare that you are a gamer with a $400 GPU is going to be searching for oil deposits in his/her spare time on the same machine.
Dobs - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
Perhaps you can help me understand what Medical Imaging has to do with searching for oil deposits?Staples - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Or maybe that should be:a typical gamer
Probably the latter.
Doormat - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
"I want a CUDA enabled version of x264"Amen to that. Plus possibly a WPF version of Handbrake to make it look more elegant. I could care less about video preview.
Also, does BadaBoom support reading from ISOs or do I have to mount with DaemonTools?
I have a Q9450 OC'd to 3.2GHz, so I'm pretty happy with my x264 performance. My iPhone movies are usually done in about 3x realtime (90 minute movie in 30 mintues) at 700-900kbit/s, and the PS3/360 movies are done a little bit quicker (since there is no resizing going on, just transcoding).
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
Badaboom doesn't support reading from ISOs, you have to mount with DT.-A
Manabu - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
>> "I want a CUDA enabled version of x264"It was already tried: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=139158">http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=139158
Dark Shikari (x264 developer) said:
"Given my experience so far in trying to port the motion search to CUDA, and Avail's hiring of a contractor to attempt to do so, I'd put the quote for porting the whole encoder somewhere on the level of a few million dollars... if you can even find people willing and able to do it."
"GPU encoding has a lot of potential, but it has a lot of weaknesses too. Its a bit like programming for a Cell or an FPGA, except exponentially more of a nightmare."
EvilBob - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
page 6 appears to have the wrong figure - according to the text, it should show energy use information, but the table currently rendering shows the badaboom regular v. pro comparison.sideshow23bob - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Isn't the product name Badaboom maybe a Fifth Element reference considering the company has the name Elemental in its name. Just a guess. If that's the case it's slightly cooler.