BD Ripper (3D Plus) CUDA: Very disappointing

[tinue]

I switched from an ATI to an NVidia Card, and thought that the BD Ripper is now much faster. Unfortunately, the speedup is 1% at best.

The NVidia Card is rather high end (overclocked GTX 460), and the CPU is rather old (Q6600), so the difference should be biggger.

Before switching the card, I got about 43fps in bluray ripping (from an ISO image, not from a real BluRay disk). The CPU was at 100% with all four cores.

Settings were CoreAVC for decoding, Software for encoding.

Now, with the new graphics card installed, everything is about the same:
CPU at 100% on all four cores, Graphics Card fan is whirring, so I assume the card has something to do, but I only get 44fps.

The only setting I changed is the encoding, to CUDA+Software. It tells me in the window "CUDA GPU acceleration for video encoding enabled".

Is there something wrong here, or is CUDA 100% useless?

Thanks, Martin

Update: In a small tool I can see that the GPU load is between 7 and 10%. So it appears that CUDA is barely used, while the CPU is stuck at 100% load.

[IPopov50]

I switched from an ATI to an NVidia Card, and thought that the BD Ripper is now much faster. Unfortunately, the speedup is 1% at best.

tinue, to make an "apple-to-apple" comparison, you should test same source content

The NVidia Card is rather high end (overclocked GTX 460), and the CPU is rather old (Q6600), so the difference should be biggger.

Yes, it should... if your settings actually employing your card. From what you are saying here, your GPU only partially engaged in a process - only encoder.

Before switching the card, I got about 43fps in bluray ripping (from an ISO image, not from a real BluRay disk). The CPU was at 100% with all four cores.

Using file from HDD as a source is a good practice.

Settings were CoreAVC for decoding, Software for encoding.

both encoder and decoder are set for CPU processing, That's why you have 100% load - nothing wrong with it.

Now, with the new graphics card installed, everything is about the same:
CPU at 100% on all four cores, Graphics Card fan is whirring, so I assume the card has something to do, but I only get 44fps.

Nothing unexpected here. Your decoder still CoreAVC, and it eats up CPU capacity. Try to set both decoder and encoder for CUDA and see what will happen. Please let us know results.

The only setting I changed is the encoding, to CUDA+Software. It tells me in the window "CUDA GPU acceleration for video encoding enabled".

Correct. The thing is, your source content has to be decoded and encoded to get what you asked for, but most extensive part of the process - decoding - you loaded up on CPU, leaving GPU out of it...

Is there something wrong here, or is CUDA 100% useless?

No, CUDA is very helpful

[Xalky]

Quote:
Now, with the new graphics card installed, everything is about the same:
CPU at 100% on all four cores, Graphics Card fan is whirring, so I assume the card has something to do, but I only get 44fps.
Nothing unexpected here. Your decoder still CoreAVC, and it eats up CPU capacity. Try to set both decoder and encoder for CUDA and see what will happen. Please let us know results.

Quote:
The only setting I changed is the encoding, to CUDA+Software. It tells me in the window "CUDA GPU acceleration for video encoding enabled".
Correct. The thing is, your source content has to be decoded and encoded to get what you asked for, but most extensive part of the process - decoding - you loaded up on CPU, leaving GPU out of it...

Quote:
Is there something wrong here, or is CUDA 100% useless?
No, CUDA is very helpful

I'm getting 2 of these gtx460s in a few days which will be running parallel SLI. Is there a tutorial somewhere that I can view to set these up correctly?

I wanna make sure I'm squeezing every bit of potential out of these graphics cards.

[tinue]

Thank you for your support! I re-tested everything, with mixed results. Here is what I try:
- I have three different source ISO images:
a) H.264 Encoded BluRay
b) VC1 Encoded BluRay
c) DVD

All three of them I want to convert to the iPod format, using the iPod profile in BluRay Ripper and DVD Ripper. I change the target bitrate to 2900 (BluRays) and 2000 (DVD).

Here are the results:

a) H.264 Encoded BluRay:
- Fastest Setting is CUDA/CUDA (decode/encode). Conversion time is 54 Minutes vs. 1:16 for Software/Software, which is roughly a 30% increase for CUDA.

b) VC1 Encoded BluRay:
- Fastest Setting is again CUDA/CUDA. 38 Minutes vs. 1:03 for Software/Software. This time, 40% increase.

c) DVD:
- Fastest Setting is CUDA/Software (not CUDA/CUDA as with BluRay). Sppeedup is about 20%

So, CUDA is not useless, but delivers less than I hoped. I actually thought that total time is about 50% of a software only solution, given that the GPU is rather high end and the CPU relatively old.

GPU was never more loaded than about 24%, so there is still potential to change the decode/Encode process, I hope.

Thanks and best regards, Martin

[CBR929]

I'm getting 2 of these gtx460s in a few days which will be running parallel SLI. Is there a tutorial somewhere that I can view to set these up correctly?

I wanna make sure I'm squeezing every bit of potential out of these graphics cards.

I am not sure if you will see any improvement, because I do not think that you can run cards in SLI with Fab....maybe someone else will chime in on this to help you Hopefully IPopov50
CBR929

[Motley]

The biggest benefit I see with running CUDA on my system is that it uses very little of my CPU, and doesn't use much of my GPU either (go figure).

I'm using a GTX 580, and an i930. Ripping avatar, I got just over 60fps, but the whole time, I was using 10-12% of my CPU and similiar on my GPU, which freed up my PC to do anything I wanted to while ripping.

[pway]

Tested SLI and no gain using SLI config and DVDfab. GPU Monitoring using Everest showed SLI configured but using only a single Card GPU at 63 -80%. No activity on the second card. Same exact results when SLI is disabled.

[jwmcmann]

Tru GPU-Z

Try GPU-Z to monitor your GPU's Cuda processing. It was an eye opener for me to see what the GPU was doing when I made changes to the various options.

Best of luck,

Jim McMann

[Motley]

Thanks for the tip Jim. I was using evga's tools, but GPU-Z also shows the hardware video decoder usage, and that appears to be what is bottlenecking my rips.

[GregiBoy]

Tested SLI and no gain using SLI config and DVDfab. GPU Monitoring using Everest showed SLI configured but using only a single Card GPU at 63 -80%. No activity on the second card. Same exact results when SLI is disabled.

Fab has never claimed to use SLI. In fact there a multiple posts on this forum saying that it doesn't.