ATI Stream: finally, CUDA has some competition!!

[HTC]

Imagine if you told everybody you were going to throw this awesome, mind-altering, uberlicious party. But the day of the party, the first people in the door discovered that the plumbing was backed up, and everybody left, which was fine because the live band had been killed by freak tornado while en route. Five months later, you try to throw the same party again. The difference is that now you have a Fisher boom box instead of a live band, and, thanks to some duct tape, the plumbing works. Meanwhile, another guy down the block has already started throwing his own party. The invitations look a lot like yours. He’s serving the same drinks. You’re throwing in a free party favor, but no one seems to care, in part because the people who might care are already bustin’ moves down the block. Several people have RSVPed for your soiree, but only two or three have showed up so far.

You’re AMD, and the name of your party is “ATI Stream.”

If you caught our recent coverage of Nvidia’s CUDA platform, then you’re up to speed on the state of GPGPU processing, or GPU computing, or whatever you want to call it these days, and you know that ATI Stream stands alongside CUDA as one of the two most prevalent GPU computing platforms available today. The idea with GPU computing is to take highly parallelized tasks typically run in the CPU and offload them to the GPU, where they can run more quickly and efficiently. Programmable shaders are exceptionally well-suited for floating point-intensive tasks. Each shader operates as its own sort of processor core, so instead of having four or eight threads crunching on a parallelized task in the CPU, you could have 64 or 320 or however many stream processors tackling the same work in the GPU. Naturally, the program has to be coded to take advantage of this architecture, and the operations need to involve a relatively heavy amount of arithmetic per memory fetch in order to see decent results.

When Stream launched last December, AMD had only enabled it to accelerate encoding into MPEG-2 and H.264 formats. The acceleration part was fine. What AMD hadn’t counted on was that it would be deluged with criticisms over its encoding quality. With the May’s Catalyst 9.5 driver update, though, we finally have bug fixes for the quality issues and a fuller acceleration pipeline that now includes MPEG-2 and H.264 decoding, as well as resolution scaling. You can see this represented in the high-level illustration shown here.

The burning question, of course, is how does Stream stack up? Was it worth the wait? We’ve got some preliminary answers and more besides, but first, let’s step back for some perspective...

The whole article is here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-stream-gpgpu,2335.html

 

[Mussels]

ATI stream still cant do H264 DEcoding, which makes it worthless to most. until that happens, we wont get H264 decoding for files...

 

[Deleted member 24505]

With the May’s Catalyst 9.5 driver update, though, we finally have bug fixes for the quality issues and a fuller acceleration pipeline that now includes MPEG-2 and H.264 decoding, as well as resolution scaling.

On the first page of the link it says it can do DEcoding.

 

[Mussels]

On the first page of the link it says it can do DEcoding.

but it doesnt work.

The coreAVC forums are covered in people asking where there is no support for ATI cards and hardware decoding, and the answer always comes back the same: ATI's hardare DEcoding support is not accesible through stream. The cards can do it, but you cant access the low level features through stream yet.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Oh right sorry.

 

[HTC]

but it doesnt work.

The coreAVC forums are covered in people asking where there is no support for ATI cards and hardware decoding, and the answer always comes back the same: ATI's hardare DEcoding support is not accesible through stream. The cards can do it, but you cant access the low level features through stream yet.

Have you heard of MediaShow Espresso? Isn't it the sort of prog required for stream accelerated transcoding? Not free, though

 

[Mussels]

Have you heard of MediaShow Espresso? Isn't it the sort of prog required for stream accelerated transcoding? Not free, though

thats an encoding program. its also about the only thng that works with stream at the moment.


Stream has a lot of potential - but they've got some serious issues to work out before its useful to anyone.

 

[HTC]

thats an encoding program. its also about the only thng that works with stream at the moment.

Stream has a lot of potential - but they've got some serious issues to work out before its useful to anyone.

It's better then a few months ago. It's improving, though quite slowly

Here's a post by EastCoasthandle regarding Espresso: http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=95094

EDIT

One thing claimed, in the article, is that Stream is optimized for multiple simultaneous transcodes and that's why only one transcode doesn't max out the GPU: not even close.

I'm making a test run and and it's between 0 and 26% GPU load on my puny 4670, as shown in the pic below:

 

[Mussels]

i'm downloading the trial now, so that i can give it a shot later

I'm going to try ripping a blu ray movie to a 1080P and then 720P file, and see how it goes... and if it works with crossfire.

 

[HTC]

i'm downloading the trial now, so that i can give it a show later

I'm going to try ripping a blu ray movie to a 1080P and then 720P file, and see how it goes... and if it works with crossfire.

OK but, in order for it to work, it must have this check box: "Enable ATI Stream to maximize performance". Check the pic below, as an example:

If you manage to get it to work, by all means, post results with ATI stream enabled and disabled, if possible.

 

[Mussels]

first of all, i need to figure out how to make it rip my blu-ray disk... thats not something we should discuss on forum, however.

They mentioned you could do it with VOB files from DVD, but i have no idea when it comes to blu ray.


edit: program is pretty crap. Ripped my movie to the HDD and went to convert - whaddya know, the ONLY output options you get are .M2TS files. no avi, no MKV, nothing.

edit 2: I ripped the movie to a a 25GB M2TS file on my drive... and guess what, this program cant even read it. it reads the smaller <1GB files fine, and the large 25GB file plays in windows media player... so at a guess, this program just sucks balls. so not only is the only output format a useless format for most things, it cant even READ several files of that format. sigh.

 

[Cheeseball]

Heh, *.M2TS is Sony's AVCHD format. Kinda useless unless you're going to cross-encode to a PSP or PS3.

 

[TheLaughingMan]

Maybe the current decoding problem is not with Stream, but with the crap software that uses Stream. ATI needs to get more companies backing Stream to provide better usability.

I want Nero to start using Stream and Cuda.

 

[Mussels]

programs that need stream, and need it NOW:

CoreAVC
Some USEFUL effing encoding program
havok