I have been Googling to try and find info and have not found much to help.
My company does a lot of video work and the Mac they use, while very nice, seems slow.
I have been trying to research faster encoding methods supposing that a system with a strong GPU in it would surpass a CPU bound system.
I’ll make it simple…how can I get the fastest video encoding (using Adobe’s suite) possible for under $3000?
Put another way: Where is the focus? GPU or CPU?
To put it in simple terms, calculating easily parallellizable floatiing point operations is exactly what a GPU is designed for, so it will be far faster.
On the other hand, many Macs (and I’m thinking about the Mac Pros specifically) are constructed with graphics processing in mind. Whatever tool you’re using to encode video (assuming it’s a professional tool) is probably designed to make the best use of the existing hardware, in other words using hardware rendering as much as possible.
Video encoding daughter boards have been around for awhile.
A daughter board is an optional card designed to plug into your graphics card. It’ll interface with the GPU as needed.
2011 article listing various daughter cards. There’s several encoding cards listed and several capture cards.
http://news.thomasnet.com/news/computer-hardware-peripherals/coprocessor-daughter-cards
The new Intel Core line (Sandy Bridge chipset) are remarkably quick at transcoding, as there are processor cores on the CPU designed just for that. Using Lucid’s Virtu, you can also in some cases combine graphics cores on external video cards, as from nVidia or ATI with the processor built in ones.
We do a small handful of encoding here. One of the PCs has an i7 with a pair of HD 5700s (Crossfire). Would encoding/editing likely be able to take advantage of the GPU–or pair of GPUs? Enough to warrant installing the relevant software (mostly Adobe) and trying it out?
That’s what I am interested in.
Also, I have seen some sites suggest software encoding produces better results albeit they are slower.
I saw a video of a demo of the Sandybridge processor and it was impressive on encoding. It encoded 4 videos in less time than the previous generation did it with one video and the older CPU was pegged at 100% CPU usage while the new one never broke 20%.