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.
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mediaconvert - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
I record a lot of tele on my computer and am always wanting faster ways to convert and compress my videos. When I heard about ati producing an equivilant of badaboom I was really excited and thought I could finally justify spending £150+ on a graphics card especially when it would be faster than the cpu. I have a ati 3450 and man was I dissapointed. I tried to compress a 120mb mpeg2 file and ended up with a 150 mb file. Also if the reviews are right it doesn't use the gpu. whats the point in having a gpu converter that doesn't use the gpu??? I can only speak for myself but if amd/ati comes out with a serious way of quickly converting/compressing the mpeg2 files (perhaps also with a batch processing mode) then they have a sale here especially if it allows me to play the latest video games.Currently I have been looking at video cards and I have to say there are two things pushing me to nvidia one is badaboom and the other nvidias hybridpower (use of an nvidia motherboard integrated graphics to reduce gpu usage and hence gpu fan noise when gpu is not needed)
I recon ati/amd needs to get creative here and really commit to gpu video conversion. ( or even gpu + cpu video conversion ) If they can produce real world speed benefits then people will buy it.
Focher - Wednesday, December 17, 2008 - link
I have a 3-way SLI of 280s with a QX9650 CPU. I have both Badaboom and TMPG Xpress, both of which support GPU encoding. In my experience, I can actually encode video a bit faster with just the CPU. Badaboom apparently supports multi-GPU configurations now, but only to split encoding when you have queued multiple files. TMPG Xpress is definitely the more powerful and capable tool, but doesn't support multiple GPUs. Also, Badaboom apparently just released 1.1 that adds quite a few features but I have not yet tried it.Rainman200 - Wednesday, December 17, 2008 - link
Just assign resources to help the developers of x264 to make use of GPU's through OpenCL and that will do more good than any of these waste of time apps.Anand I'd definitely say the x264 is sharper vs Badaboom in the two pictures you posted, also please use Ribot264 or AutoMKV as they use the latest builds of x264, Handbrake trails development of x264 because of its Apple Mac focus so important features added to x264 which improve its image quality are left out months behind other x264 encoders.
dryloch - Wednesday, December 17, 2008 - link
I had a few ATI cards years ago but have been using Nvidia recently. I decided to try a 4800 series ATI card this time around partly because I hoped the number of stream processors would be useful for stuff like this. I have been looking forward to this driver for months and now they release something that doesn't work. My time is valuable to me ATI, don't waste it trying to make somthing work that you know is broken. I don't care what happens with the speed of the next gen cards I am going back to Nvidia.toyotabedzrock - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=647">http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=647This review seems to have gotten it to work better. Althought still not flawless.
talmholt - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
Anand,I think some of your issues are coming from Vista. I have used the converter on a WinXP32 machine with good results. It converts a 2 hour movie (MPEG2 640x480 3GB initial size) to an iPod file (320x240 500MB final size) in 8 minutes and the result is flawless!
I have also tried converting HDTV (OTA) content to a DVD format and that worked great too.
PS, my system is only a Intel Core 2 E6420 with a AMD 4850 (everything at stock speeds). Please try again Anand.
Thomas
Chris Simmo - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
I use handbrake, but noticed something wierd. I had a 9800GT in the system, using handbrakes default movie options x264 and I would get about 150 turbo first pass, 48fps second pass on my overclocked q9400@3.5. I changed the graphics over to a HD4850, and saw an option for VP3. I selected it, the CLI crashed, the handbrake UI was still running though, changed back to x264, and then it was 290 turbo first pass and over 150 second pass. This is running vista 64 with the 8.12 drivers. During this time the GPU temp went up 2 degrees, all four cores were at 100%. I really need some one else to have a play and see what they get. I put in a 4870 to try, but I hadn't worked out the VP3 thing yet, so it didn't change form the standard 48fpsChris Simmo - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
Sorry, that was 'Shaun of the dead' DVD to MKV,niuniu2012 - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
You can use http://www.dvdtomp3converter.com/">http://www.dvdtomp3converter.com/ to select target subtitle and audio track according at your will. DVD to MP3 Converter also provides you with fruitful options to set audio properties of audio bitrate, Sample Rate and so on.piroroadkill - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
"Last year, NVIDIA introduced it's CUDA"it is CUDA!