Badaboom: A Full Test of Elemental's GPU Accelerated H.264 Transcoder
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 18, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
I hate to be so negative about a product like Badaboom because it holds so much potential, unfortunately it just left me disappointed. There’s no way to set custom resolutions, there’s a 5Mbps bitrate cap, there’s no support for Main/High H.264 profiles, there’s no support for Dolby Digital/DTS audio, you can't convert Blu-ray movies, DivX support is flaky at best and there are output issues with some DVD titles.
For the first GPU-accelerated video transcoding application written in CUDA I expected much more from Badaboom. A simple user interface is great, but it lacks the power and customization behind it. NVIDIA has a year before Larrabee hits and you can be sure that Intel will leverage its relationships with the major codec developers (DivX anyone?) to ensure that there’s full Larrabee support right away.
The performance expectations are also interesting. Just as the 8800 GT is pretty much the minimum requirement for decent, speedy gaming in the latest titles, that ends up being the minimum requirement for solid transcoding performance. The GeForce 9500 GT and slower are only really upgrades if you have a slow dual-core CPU, the quad-core offerings are faster than any of NVIDIA's lower end GPUs. The 8800 GT, 9800 GTX and GTX 200 class of products all offer somewhere in the 2 - 4x range of a performance improvement over Intel's quad-core CPUs. While eight-core Nehalems will help close that gap, it's clear that GPUs are much more energy efficient for video transcoding.
NVIDIA needs to do more with companies like Elemental to make sure that launches like this don’t happen. Badaboom held so much promise but disappoints as it is nothing more than a quick way of getting some videos onto your MP3 player or game console without terrible concern for quality or features.
It takes users 10 - 30 hours to transcode an entire Blu-ray movie at the best quality settings on some of the fastest Intel CPUs, that’s where we need GPU acceleration. Target the top and trickle down to address the rest of the market, it’s the NVIDIA approach and it’s one that Elemental doesn’t embrace with Badaboom. This application is reasonable, at best, for the mainstream and does nothing for those serious about transcoding video.
Fix the compatibility problems, fix the crashes, fix the frame rate output issues and then we’ll have a decent app for the mainstream user just looking to put content on their iPhone/iPod. For an app that promises to fix the issue of video codec compatibility, it sure does a poor job of making sure that it itself is compatible with even the codecs it is supposed to support.
AMD has its own response to Badaboom coming before the end of the year. Cyberlink's PowerDirector is supposed to enable GPU accelerated video transcode, but it's a sad day when a video enthusiast has to look to Cyberlink to save the day. What both AMD and NVIDIA need to do is help the open source community and existing codec developers include GPU acceleration in their software today.
I want a CUDA enabled version of x264 or of the MainConcept H.264 encoder. While it's admirable that companies like Elemental would attempt their own codec and front end, there are better alternatives out there today.
There's clearly potential for GPU-accelerated H.264 video encoding, but the first attempt was honestly a bust. Let's hope Elemental or someone else gets it right for round two...
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JarredWalton - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
While what you say is true to an extent, we're testing the value of a specific piece of hardware to perform certain work. Using your logic, gaming benchmarks are worthless as well, because it's not like you're going to play games all the time.We can look at the power question in a lot of ways. It appears an E4500 would do about just as well as the Q6600 used in testing, so for power should we compare Q6600 with IGP to E4500 with GTX 280 (or 9800)? That's certainly one valid comparison point, but if you go that route you quickly get to the stage where you have so many valid points of comparison that the project becomes unmanageable.
Personally, I assume most users understand that this is a look at energy efficiency for a specific task, and not a holistic look at PC power use. What it tells us is that in heavily bottlenecked situations, GPU encoding is far more efficient than CPU encoding. That's useful information. Now we just need a good codec and application to back it up.
Inkjammer - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Since this is still a beta version, I have to wonder how much could possibly change by end of release? Were you able to talk to Elemental to address the issues with the beta and the dissapointment in the "advanced" settings?The Pro edition seems dissapointing, but if they ironed out the kinks in the end... I'd be interested in picking it up. Will there be a follow-up review for the release version?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
I've kept Elemental aware of all of the issues I've had. I gave them some suggestions back after my first preview of the software. Every single problem I've encountered Elemental has added to their list of things to QA for, I'm hoping we'll see some significant improvements in the next major release.I will keep an open dialogue with Elemental and definitely look at any significant changes in the future.
Take care,
Anand
GotDiesel - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Oh jeez.. are these guys retarded or what??? baseline only.. wake up guys.. everyone uses HIGH at least level 4.1..this is a typical example of windows software. all GUI and no go..
what we need here is an open source version.. x264 is a perfect example of superior quality software surpassing close source .. now if only you "professionals" could do the same..
michal1980 - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
given, that most blu-ray content is already a varient of the efficent mp4 (avc,vc-1,x264 etc etc).to compress it just for the shake of saving file space seems foolish.
IMHO, in most cases, the file on the blu-ray has been encoded to give you the best possible picture in that file size. No automagic program is going to somehow make the file size smaller, and maintain the same quality.
Now if converting to a smaller resolution, theres a point, but then data loss is a given.
IMHO, this solution would ideal for a gamer that wants to work with video, since inalot of cases more cores dont make a difference in gaming... yet make sense for data compression, you could have the best of both worlds, buy a higher speed, dual core, and use the money saved on a faster video card....
if only the software worked.
gamerk2 - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
They said the same things with the .mpeg (and later. .mp3) formats: Why convert from .WAV and lose data and quality?michal1980 - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
at least with a wav to mp3, theres a compression coversion.starting with a blu-ray to just run x264 on it.
is like taking and mp3, and converting it to mp3 again, just with more compression.
your stacking detail loss.
JarredWalton - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
True, but at 20-40 GB per BRD even a 1TB HDD runs out of space with only 20-50 movies. A 35 Mbps AVC stream may look "best", but outside of still captures I bet most users wouldn't notice a difference between 35 Mpbs AVC and 20 Mbps AVC... or possibly even 10 to 15 Mbps.michal1980 - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
if i'm buying a blu-ray, and paying for that 30-35Mbps. Why would I kill it?it just baffels me.
Lonyo - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Since the 9600GT isn't too far off the 8800GT in gaming, but has a large difference in the number of SP's (IIRC), it would be interesting to see how the two compare, rather than looking at even lower end cards like the 9500 and 8600's.Any chance of some additional numbers (even only one benchmark) using the 9600?