Video Card for Transcoding?

[13Gigatons]

What card do you recommended for a rig that will be used for transcoding only (no gaming).

I know Nvidia has a full EPU now instead of using cuda for this function. So what basic card should I get?

 

[Headfoot]

I'd wait to see what happens with new cards coming out in June. I'd expect that they will be quite a bit more advanced for HTPC sorts of stuff including the HDCP/HDMI protocols etc.

 

[TheRyuu]

Pretty sure most video cards suck at it. If you really need something with hardware acceleration I'd look at using Quicksync. I'm pretty sure that's by far and away the best option available (for hardware accelerated encoding) provided you're using Haswell or newer. Otherwise nothing beats software still.

Also nvenc can still be accessed through CUDA. The encoder uses dedicated hardware though and not the actual GPU. I suppose if you need something stupid fast and at absurd bitrates then you can make do with nvenc. The new cards coming out soon should have h265 support as well which wouldn't really be possible to do in real time in software so I guess it has that going for it. Just hope the quality doesn't blow like it does on their h264 offerings.

Actual GPU's aren't very good at video encoding.

 

[nvgpu]

GM200/204/206 all have the same NVENC hardware generation which already supports HEVC or H.264 4K encoding since 2014(GM204) & 2015(GM200/206).

Pascal should have an upgraded NVENC block.

 

[TheRyuu]

GM200/204/206 all have the same NVENC hardware generation which already supports HEVC or H.264 4K encoding since 2014(GM204) & 2015(GM200/206).

Pascal should have an upgraded NVENC block.

How good is the HEVC (h265) encoding on those? Is it as horrendously bad as the h264 encoding is/was on kepler (which is what I have so that's all I can compare it to)?

 

[13Gigatons]

How good is the HEVC (h265) encoding on those? Is it as horrendously bad as the h264 encoding is/was on kepler (which is what I have so that's all I can compare it to)?

I thought the NVENC was suppose to be better quality then cuda encoding?

I've only used Intel quicksync and cuda for hardware encoding so far.

 

[thesmokingman]

How good is the HEVC (h265) encoding on those? Is it as horrendously bad as the h264 encoding is/was on kepler (which is what I have so that's all I can compare it to)?

It's pretty good actually. I don't know the time to encode but I've tested a few of the ups to see and it looks fine. Have you got linux?