Well Nvidia. Quality over speed for video encoding.
And I don't really care how much load it takes off the CPU. I paid for a quad and I want it to flex it's muscles.
Nvidia's PhysX support is nice for gaming too. Work and play all in one card/
Though I would guess Quadro cards would run Cuda even better than the GeForce range as they are aimed at work.
@Nintenboy01:
I don't know. PhysX is great and all, but I can't think of any games that have REALLY utilized it.
Sure, Mirror's Edge has an abundance of plastic wrap, and Arkham Asylum has a large quantity of paper all over the floor to fly around while you fight enemies, but is that really what PhysX is all about?
I still go with Nvidia... though not for any particular reason. I suppose I'm more well versed in Nvidia cards, and I have come to appreciate EVGA.
I think you're confusing transcoding with recompression. Sounds like these products recompress video, i.e., decompress the source and then compress it in another format. Transcoding is different: it means parsing the source bitstream and intelligently converting it to another format, or even the same format at a different bitrate, without all the work involved in encoding.
Something like Nero Recode does transcoding, and it can process an entire two-hour movie in software (on the CPU) in a half-hour or so -- far less time than it would take to recompress -- because it's simply changing quantization and going MPEG-2 to MPEG-2. It doesn't need to do motion estimation, which is the most time-consuming part of encoding. There are transcoders to convert between different M-JPEG formats too (of which there are many) that simply repackage the JPEG data in whatever quirky format is required without recompressing, i.e., running DCT on all the image data.
Haven't used Avivo, but Badaboom's pickiness about what it'll take disappointed me a lot. I was expecting support for more computer-native formats from the outset (their marketing implies that), only to find out it hadn't been implemented yet. So I had to encode my files through Sony Vegas again, as I've been doing for awhile. But I do look forward to delivered promises of GPU-accelerated encoding.
The Quadro cards are explicitly NOT for gaming. They are for high-end realtime rendering of 3D development assetts, medical research displays and things of that nature.
They (and their drivers) are highly optimized for different tasks and not optimized for the types of shaders and effects used in games.
Comparing consumer-level 3D gaming cards to the Quadro product line would be like comparing a high-end sports car, like a Ferrari, to a high speed mag-lev bullet train. Both are powerful types of vehicles, but have vastly different purposes; the former being single user high-speed excitement, and the latter being multi-user, high-speed transport for massive projects.
08/10/09
08/10/09
Am I gonna get banned for mentioning the poorest excuse of a graphics card ever?
08/11/09
08/10/09
And I don't really care how much load it takes off the CPU. I paid for a quad and I want it to flex it's muscles.
Nvidia's PhysX support is nice for gaming too. Work and play all in one card/
Though I would guess Quadro cards would run Cuda even better than the GeForce range as they are aimed at work.
08/10/09
08/10/09
08/10/09
I don't know. PhysX is great and all, but I can't think of any games that have REALLY utilized it.
Sure, Mirror's Edge has an abundance of plastic wrap, and Arkham Asylum has a large quantity of paper all over the floor to fly around while you fight enemies, but is that really what PhysX is all about?
I still go with Nvidia... though not for any particular reason. I suppose I'm more well versed in Nvidia cards, and I have come to appreciate EVGA.
08/10/09
Consumers win
08/10/09
Except when they fix prices.
08/11/09
08/11/09
But for pricing and fairness? Definitely. Better hope that they aren't collaborating within, though.
12/06/08
Something like Nero Recode does transcoding, and it can process an entire two-hour movie in software (on the CPU) in a half-hour or so -- far less time than it would take to recompress -- because it's simply changing quantization and going MPEG-2 to MPEG-2. It doesn't need to do motion estimation, which is the most time-consuming part of encoding. There are transcoders to convert between different M-JPEG formats too (of which there are many) that simply repackage the JPEG data in whatever quirky format is required without recompressing, i.e., running DCT on all the image data.
12/06/08
11/10/08
They (and their drivers) are highly optimized for different tasks and not optimized for the types of shaders and effects used in games.
Comparing consumer-level 3D gaming cards to the Quadro product line would be like comparing a high-end sports car, like a Ferrari, to a high speed mag-lev bullet train. Both are powerful types of vehicles, but have vastly different purposes; the former being single user high-speed excitement, and the latter being multi-user, high-speed transport for massive projects.
11/10/08
[arstechnica.com]