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ati radeon hd 4870 mac edition specifications
I’m getting a new Mac Pro FCP system and haven’t been able to find detailed specifications for the ati radeon hd 4870 mac edition.
The PC version specs show “accelerated transcoding and decoding for H.264 and Mpeg2”.
Is this on the Mac version? Is it accessed/useful when compressing video to H.264 and Mpeg2?
George
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1 Reply
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The PC version at AMDs page does indeed speak of accelerated H.264 rendering but with this footnote…
“This may vary depending on your system configuration and video formats. Using an Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16 GHz based PC, AMD was able to achieve GPU accelerated transcoding speeds up to 19x faster using Cyberlink PowerDirector than when using the same CPU alone with MainConcept encoder in Adobe Premiere CS3. Using the same system, full 1080p files were converted 1.8x faster than real-time.”
On Apple’s page on Graphics cards for new MacPros, there are comparisons for games and Motion. There’s no mention of the impact of Graphics cards on encoding. But there are benchmarks showing that H.264 encodes are faster with the new MacPros than with older ones.
So, I doubt if, with the current versions of Compressor, encoding is speeded up by graphics cards in any way. If encoding is bread-and-butter for you, consider getting a card just for that. It’ll pay for itself. Also, consider using Qmaster with multiple machines (if you have spare iMacs, MacBook Pros or even other Macs around).
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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India
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