Video Card Question (SLI - Does it = faster ripping speeds)

Hokenweazen

My video card is a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 and I was wondering if I bought another one and ran them in SLI mode would ripping blu-rays take less time ?

I am currently using Blu-Ray to Mobile, Xbox 360 (.wmv), with the CUDA encoder for video and whatever the default is for audio.

Here are some of my other systems specs if that matters:
CPU- i7 930 Quad Core
Memory - 6 gig
OS - Windows 7 Ultimate N 64 bit
Blu-ray - LG UH10LS20

Currently it's taking about 3-3 1/2 hours per disk to create a .wmv that I can stream to my 360.

IPopov50

Hokenweazen
Looks like you have very nicely built machine. I wouldn't recommend you to buy additional card for sake of additional GPU. Your current GPU is a high-end multi-GPU card, and adding more wouldn't help. And here's why. When you have several processing units and one block of data (that's what movie essentially is) to process, firstly you are facing challenge of splitting this block of data on little chunks and distribute among processing units according to their processing capacity. Secondly, you facing a challenge to pick up those pieces and stitch them together seamlessly. Believe me, this is really hard to do. This kind of data management and workload distribution in DVDFab is far from perfection. Developers are in right direction, and eventually will get there, than we all will think how to utilize this capability better, and what hardware improvements needed. In a meanwhile, if you would have GPU monitor, you would see that one core of you existing GPU has barely 10-20% load, and another 2-3% at best. You have room of 180% for improvement before your resource is exhausted.
I hope my explanation helps you to make right decision.

[QUOTE=Hokenweazen;33182]My video card is a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 and I was wondering if I bought another one and ran them in SLI mode would ripping blu-rays take less time ?

I am currently using Blu-Ray to Mobile, Xbox 360 (.wmv), with the CUDA encoder for video and whatever the default is for audio.

Here are some of my other systems specs if that matters:
CPU- i7 930 Quad Core
Memory - 6 gig
OS - Windows 7 Ultimate N 64 bit
Blu-ray - LG UH10LS20

Currently it's taking about 3-3 1/2 hours per disk to create a .wmv that I can stream to my 360.[/QUOTE]

maineman

I couldn't agree more with IPopov50.
Save your $...for now anyway.

I have essentially the same rig, but a step down with a nVidia GeForce GTX 260.
My GPU usually hangs in the 10-15% range with Blu-Ray to Mobile conversions.

I've only just started fooling with BR's, so my experience is very limited, but
IPopov50's advice is spot on.

Hokenweazen

That was explained perfect IPopov50, as always thank you !

Thanks, I would rather keep the money for the flood of 360 games I want to pickup in May anyway lol.

bushy

So can I conclude from the low utilization that the "make" and "model" of the graphics card does not have much bearing on the transcoding process?

IPopov50

You can conclude it, but it will be a wrong conclusion.
In order to participate in encoding/decoding process, card has to be CUDA enabled (for nVIDIA cards) or DXVA enabled (for ATI cards). Single core GPUs soon will be in disadvantage because DVDFab developers working on load distribution and will soon distribute encoding and decoding between cores.

[QUOTE=bushy;33590]So can I conclude from the low utilization that the "make" and "model" of the graphics card does not have much bearing on the transcoding process?[/QUOTE]