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Thread ID: 110384 2010-06-14 22:37:00 Anyone had a play with the latest VLC beta? nofam (9009) PC World Chat
Post ID Timestamp Content User
1110276 2010-06-14 22:37:00 I see it supports GPU acceleration? Sounds like (as usual), it works better with nVidia gear at this stage.

As an aside, I do wonder how much longer developers will worry about GPU offloading; CPU's are getting so powerful and cheap now, that I suspect even the basic Core i3 chips can easily play 1080p with plenty of headroom?

Using the GPU for transcoding would be nice, but certainly not essential. 		nofam (9009)
1110277 2010-06-15 00:52:00 Mostly because of the speed of things, GPU's are dedicated to doing that type of work, and it really makes a noticeable difference with hardware acceleration when you're talking about mobile devices.

Then there's also the fact that it's faster to encode high definition video using the GPU rather than the CPU also. CPU's are never the limiting factor, GPU's are, regardless of if it's gaming, playback / decoding, or encoding of video, it's always faster with a better GPU. Of course you can't just whack the latest nVidia / ATi graphics cards in a 2Ghz Celeron and hope it'll work, there is some method to the madness, but by and large if everythings being offloaded to the GPU, then yes, the CPU is largely irrelevant.

Same for gaming, once you reach the dual-core 3Ghz mark, almost all games that are out will start to just require a faster GPU rather than the CPU needing upgrading. The CPU just handles the likes of the AI, decoding of sound files for playback whereas GPU handles rendering of video, smoothing of edges, textures... Everything the CPU does, is pretty much the same, regardless of the resolution that you run your display at.

In summary, hardware acceleration is all good :D 		Chilling_Silence (9)
1110278 2010-06-15 01:06:00 Mostly because of the speed of things, GPU's are dedicated to doing that type of work, and it really makes a noticeable difference with hardware acceleration when you're talking about mobile devices.

Then there's also the fact that it's faster to encode high definition video using the GPU rather than the CPU also. CPU's are never the limiting factor, GPU's are, regardless of if it's gaming, playback / decoding, or encoding of video, it's always faster with a better GPU. Of course you can't just whack the latest nVidia / ATi graphics cards in a 2Ghz Celeron and hope it'll work, there is some method to the madness, but by and large if everythings being offloaded to the GPU, then yes, the CPU is largely irrelevant.

Same for gaming, once you reach the dual-core 3Ghz mark, almost all games that are out will start to just require a faster GPU rather than the CPU needing upgrading. The CPU just handles the likes of the AI, decoding of sound files for playback whereas GPU handles rendering of video, smoothing of edges, textures... Everything the CPU does, is pretty much the same, regardless of the resolution that you run your display at.

In summary, hardware acceleration is all good :D

Yeah, I guess my point is that even though GPU parallel computing will always be faster by its nature than a CPU can manage, does the end result (i.e. the gain in speed) justify the apparent difficulty in getting it to work?

Are there any benchmarks to show a top-of-the-line Core i7 vs a middle-of-the-road GPU in encoding to h.264 etc? 		nofam (9009)
1110279 2010-06-15 01:13:00 You're presuming everybody has more than 2 cores in their CPU, and that they're running at decent clock speeds too ... Chilling_Silence (9)
1110280 2010-06-15 01:15:00 A side note, VLC are developing their own video editor.
Should be good.

trac.videolan.org 		KarameaDave (15222)
1110281 2010-06-15 01:23:00 You're presuming everybody has more than 2 cores in their CPU, and that they're running at decent clock speeds too ...

For the enthusiasts that want the best of the best, absolutely; but as I suggested, even the lower end-users running an Arrandale chipset for example, would still be able to play/encode h.264 without too much trouble? 		nofam (9009)
1110282 2010-06-15 01:29:00 So you've just answered your question:
Hardware acceleration is great for people with underpowered CPUs 		Chilling_Silence (9)
1110283 2010-06-15 01:42:00 It certainly is, I can watch freeview HD on a P4 2.93 GHz (not hyper-threader)
using an Nvidia 9400gt. Without the HW acceleration CPU maxes out and I get stuttering
video and frequent lockups, with acceleration CPU usage around 10% and smooth. 		KarameaDave (15222)
1110284 2010-06-15 02:45:00 hmm might try it out on my 3.0ghz P4 and ATI Radeon 9600 nedkelly (9059)
1110285 2010-06-15 02:51:00 I will have to try this on my lappy - currently both cores of the dual core celeron are sitting around 70% when playing back a 720p vid. :punk wratterus (105)
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