Nvidia, Pegasys announce CUDA support for TMPGEnc

Pegasys has announced that it has managed to speed its TMPGEnc video encoder up by as much as 446 percent thanks to Nvidia’s CUDA platform.

The company is demoing a beta version of TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress, which enables GPU acceleration in the application. The speedups were shown using a GeForce GTX 260 graphics card and a Core 2 Quad Q9450 which by all intents and purposes both fit into the performance segment.

TMPGEnc features support for many popular media formats, including MPEG, AVI, WMV, DivX, FLV and also DVD.

Tak Ebine, CEO of Pegasys said that CUDA has helped to "dramatically improve the filtering speed" in TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress and then added that because CUDA is based on C, it was relatively easy to achieve these speedups.

This follows on from Elemental’s BadaBoom video transcoding application and shows that it wasn’t just a one-off. One problem that we’ve experienced with BadaBoom so far though is that the video quality isn’t quite as high as we’ve seen from conventional CPU encoders.

With that in mind, we’re going to hang tight until we’ve been able to do a close assessment of Pegasys’ encode quality before making any conclusions about TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress’ viability. The good thing is that we should be able to get our hands on a final or near-final version of the software soon.

Excited by the prospects of massive video encoding speedups? Discuss in the forums.

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