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GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 12:30 pm
by vorob
Hi, I'm on Nvidia 1070, and I would like to know if HandBrake utilizes its power to encode videos? Cause no specific settings found in utility by me. Thx!

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 1:16 pm
by Woodstock
The only currently-supported accelerator is Intel's QSV, which is dedicated video encode/decode hardware, and not so much a GPU.

GPUs in general do not help much with actual encoding. They can be of some help with filtering video, but they also can cause compatibility problems.

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 3:17 pm
by vorob
That's interesting info. And what about all fairy tales about CUDA and NEVEC that Nvidia forced over a decade? Or it's more about capturing video, not re-encoding?

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 5:14 pm
by Woodstock
I believe the benchmarks for using OpenCL for encoding placed it about 5% faster in some circumstances over using the main CPU in the system, unless you were looking at an old 1- or 2-core processor. The more modern the CPU, the smaller the difference.

But the lack of someone maintaining the OpenCL code meant that it was not keeping up with advancements, and was becoming a compatibility problem. OpenCL has been the cause of a lot of crashes recently, especially on Windows 10.

NVENC is a different story - it's an encoding engine in hardware, like QSV, that you can buy on high-end video cards. But it does not have as wide of support in the open-source community for the simple reason of market saturation. If you buy an Intel-based system nowadays, you are likely to have QSV hardware; but not as many people have an NVENC-capable video card. Or AMD's version, for that matter.

The real answer is, "well done patches welcome".

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 7:36 pm
by mduell
CUDA was a joke for video encoding, NVENC is targeted toward realtime/low latency encoding (videoconferencing, streaming games, etc). You could use it with HB, but there's not a lot of interest since it's not great for efficiency.

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Mon Dec 04, 2017 7:48 pm
by HBGeek
I'm just now looking into GPU acceleration after using HandBrake for many many years.. I am switching to h.265 output and finding the render times are crazy long. I'm reading on this forum that some people feel Cuda encoding on my Nvidia (GTX980ti) is "crap" but I've done some testing comparing output from HB in h.265 with DVDFab in h.265.. the latter with Cuda enabled. OMG the render times are amazing! one particular test took 11 hours to render with HB and only 17 minutes with DVDFab. When I review the two output files, which are btw about the same size, Most scenes are cleaner in the DVDFab output, especially very dark scenes.. only some scenes look better in the HB output. Is it possible that Cuda has gotten better? Are there some non-subjective test results that supports that Cuda is crap? I have a pretty good eye for picking out artifacts, tiling and other compression affects.. it makes sense to me that using the GPU(s) would provide a lot more horsepower to the encoding.

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Mon Dec 04, 2017 8:51 pm
by s55
No, Cuda based encoding did not get better. Infact, Nvidia has abandoned it in favour of NVEnc which is vastly superior to it. It still doesn't match software encoding, but it is fast and reasonable quality compared to the horrible output that most Cuda encoders give.

NVEnc support may come to HandBrake in a later release. Intel QuickSync is supported already in the current release.

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Mon Dec 04, 2017 9:53 pm
by Woodstock
Are you sure DVDFab wasn't using NVENC instead of CUDA? Your video card has "2nd gen" NVENC capability.

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2017 2:14 pm
by HBGeek
My processor is an i7-3970X which doesn't appear to support QuickSync so I can't take advantage of that current feature in HandBrake.
The DVDFab codec screen auto-populated with "CUDA" for all the encode/decode settings except h.265 decode which is set to software.. no sign of NVENC. The encoder (h.265) dropdown shows Software, CUDA, Intel QuickSync and AMD APP as options. Selecting anything but CUDA or Software returns an error of not supported.

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2017 1:34 am
by PajiAlfa
s55 wrote: Mon Dec 04, 2017 8:51 pm No, Cuda based encoding did not get better. Infact, Nvidia has abandoned it in favour of NVEnc which is vastly superior to it. It still doesn't match software encoding, but it is fast and reasonable quality compared to the horrible output that most Cuda encoders give.

NVEnc support may come to HandBrake in a later release. Intel QuickSync is supported already in the current release.
I'm doing tests with DVDfab and my GTX 1060 and i7 4790K processor and with the acceleration going quite well, I look at the results and favorable for DVDfab at the moment.
H265 CUDA approximate measurements:
SD: 1800-2000fps
720p:920fps
1080p: 440fps.

I take 20 times less time to convert, and checking qualities in some is almost imperceptible or the difference is so little ...
At the moment I'm trying.
I am converting 500 videos that I would take with HandBreak 15-20 days and I will do it in approximately 10-12 hours.

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2017 1:54 am
by mduell
They may label the checkbox CUDA, but I bet it's NVENC not CUDA.

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2017 3:47 pm
by Woodstock
According to their website, it is NVENC:
Just as its name implies, DVDFab Lightning-Shrink takes the advantages of nVIDIA's CUDA hardware acceleration and NVENC technology, or Intel Quick Sync, to significantly cut down the time you spend on ripping or converting Blu-ray movies, shockingly to within an hour.
So no, until handbrake gains NVENC capability, it's not going to be nearly as fast on the OP's hardware as DVDfab.

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2017 6:35 pm
by HBGeek
Woodstock wrote: Wed Dec 06, 2017 3:47 pm According to their website, it is NVENC:
Just as its name implies, DVDFab Lightning-Shrink takes the advantages of nVIDIA's CUDA hardware acceleration and NVENC technology, or Intel Quick Sync, to significantly cut down the time you spend on ripping or converting Blu-ray movies, shockingly to within an hour.
So no, until handbrake gains NVENC capability, it's not going to be nearly as fast on the OP's hardware as DVDfab.
Hey thanks for digging that up.. I hadn't seen that prior.
So folks feel NVENC is competitive with software based encoding from a quality standpoint? I agree with PajiAlfa, Sure looks good to me.

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2017 6:50 pm
by s55
So folks feel NVENC is competitive with software based encoding from a quality standpoint? I agree with PajiAlfa, Sure looks good to me.
Quality is subjective, but NVEnc still requires fairly significantly more bitrate (bigger files) to achieve quality which the average person won't see a difference in or won't care.

I also find NVEnc encodes come out rather soft looking and lack fine details. Given it's more optimised towards streaming / gaming / conf that's not really surprising.

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Sun Dec 10, 2017 6:02 pm
by PajiAlfa
s55 wrote: Thu Dec 07, 2017 6:50 pm
So folks feel NVENC is competitive with software based encoding from a quality standpoint? I agree with PajiAlfa, Sure looks good to me.
Quality is subjective, but NVEnc still requires fairly significantly more bitrate (bigger files) to achieve quality which the average person won't see a difference in or won't care.

I also find NVEnc encodes come out rather soft looking and lack fine details. Given it's more optimised towards streaming / gaming / conf that's not really surprising.
Details in funds and the like is lost a bit.

At the moment the tests I did were not bad for [Censored] videos were almost the same.


The difference is that in less than 1 day I can convert as many videos as in more than 20 days.
I just saved electricity.

Re: GPU Acceleration?

Posted: Mon Dec 11, 2017 4:19 pm
by mduell
You could gain a good bit of that speed with a faster x264 preset, while making the same efficiency (quality for size) tradeoff.