OpenCL/DirectCompute (DX11) on new ATI cards

[caydr]

Hi, I know there's a GPU section but it seems to be very... slow. In the last 3 weeks the whole GPU world has been turned upside down by the new ATI Radeon HD 5x series. These support OpenCL (to my understanding) and all the features of DirectX11, including DirectCompute. OpenCL at least should be of great interest to everyone here, as it is basically an open "cuda" technology that will run on any DX11+ GPU (to my understanding), whether NV or ATI.

All the new ATI GPUs that were released in the last 3 weeks are really, really impressive... I don't know if anyone here keeps up with this kind of stuff, but it's easy to see that they're going to take a huge bite out of NV's market share. They are priced to sell fast and the lowest-end card can put the previous-generation's highest-end cards through their paces. A 5750's not going to beat a 285, but just the fact that they're in the same league is tremendous, in my opinion. That 5750, by the way, is only $100 or so if I remember correctly.

The higher-end cards, as you'd expect, are monstrously powerful, roughly on par with dual-GPU setups from the previous generation even without optimized drivers that should be arriving in the near future. And despite being so powerful they're extremely affordable - the top-end card is just $379.

This isn't so much exciting for the here and now, but for the future - NV will come back onto the scene, guns blazing, and since DirectCompute is a requirement of DX11 certification, and OpenCL uses the same technology (I know I'm glossing over important things), OpenCL is poised to become the first viable cross-platform GPU rendering/computation solution.

Are the MediaCoder developers investigating the possibilities OpenCL is bringing to the table? By year's end or shortly after the NV cards should be arriving, and ATI is expected to have their dual-GPU and/or even higher-end single-gpu cards ready to challenge NV's offerings. MC's support of CUDA to date, AFAIK/IIRC, has been nonexistent or extremely small. Many other developers have also largely ignored it as little more than a novelty, since it only runs on NV hardware. But with widespread OCL cards just around the corner, in my opinion this would be a great time to look at this technology.

[Subhadip]

I am surprised this went unnoticed. OpenCL / DirectCompute 11 is certainly the future. Thanks to CUDA's proprietary nature, it's not going to last. Developers will surely want to reach out to a larger consumer base - especially since at this moment, ATI are far and away dominant in the GPU arena. No one would want to buy inferior Nvidia cards just to use CUDA - when the same processing can easily be adapted for ATI cards using OpenCL and DirectCompute. The advantage is, of course, that both Nvidia and ATI cards support OpenCL. And when Nvidia's DX11 cards do eventually roll along, they will support DirectCompute 11 as well.

No question about it, OpenCL / DX11 support should be a top feature-to-be-considered.

[toyotabedzrock]

A few little points i want to make. OpenCL actually runs on ALL recent Nvidia cards and ATI 4XXX and up. OpenCL also runs well on the CPU of the system, in other words it is not just for graphics cards, it is a parallel compute api.

From the Khronos OpenCL page

"OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is the first open, royalty-free standard for general-purpose parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. OpenCL provides a uniform programming environment for software developers to write efficient, portable code for high-performance compute servers, desktop computer systems and handheld devices using a diverse mix of multi-core CPUs, GPUs, Cell-type architectures and other parallel processors such as DSPs"

[JEskandari]

something you must consider is that the codes that allow us encode data on GPU come from NVIDIA itself.
so it's hard to expect them to produce something that allow ATI card user use they card for encoding VIDEO by
GPU . They are just simply going to say that we don't know ATI Hardware to optimize the program for their Cards .

and writing for open-cl is like writing for another platform it's not that easy to do .just converting the codes won't do .
they must be optimized .

the only possible solution would be that ATI themselves write spme code for it , or wait for 1-2 year so someone manage to optimize a code for GPU encoding and Open-CL

[inferKNOX]

I also wanted to inquire on this.
I think adding GPU-based OpenCL encoding to MediaCoder would be an incredible addition that an innumerable number of people (myself included) would appreciate.
Is there a way to make MediaCoder take advantage of the ATI Stream SDK v2.1 with OpenCL™ 1.0 Support technology?

[mum1989]

please add opencl support like Cuda !

OpenCL is open source, free to use !!!!
cuda sucks, CUDA is proprietary

[JEskandari]

please add opencl support like Cuda !

OpenCL is open source, free to use !!!!
cuda sucks, CUDA is proprietary

dear friend I also support implementing new feature
but just wanted to say
as I know Cuda is also completely free to use and i guess there are 10 time
more documentation and help for using cuda than when you use opencl.
and I thought Cuda compiler is opensource .

also cuda encoder comes directly from nvidia
to be honest ATI cards also have the capabality to run CUDA but the problem
is that AMD decided not to support this in their drivers all they need is to add
some code and libraries in their driver and it was completely free and no license
were needed but they decided it won't worth it.