some questions on core image/video

gelosilente

hi, i know what core image/video are, but I need to know about some things that are not clear (for me)

1. QT 7 is based on core video so it will use the gpu (radeon 9600 or better, of course) for encoding? if yes, will idvd benefit from this?

2. quartz 2d extreme is another key of tiger speed, but will these tecnology boost the speed of print too?

not the speed of the printer (is hardware, i know) but the rendering for the paper printing, that sometimes seem a bit slow on panther



hope that someone can rspond, so thank you in advance, and sorry for bad english

prettyboyclone

Quote:

Originally posted by gelosilente

hi, i know what core image/video are, but I need to know about some things that are not clear (for me)

1. QT 7 is based on core video so it will use the gpu (radeon 9600 or better, of course) for encoding? if yes, will idvd benefit from this?

As I understand it, there's no components for sending video encoding to the GPU. The same goes for decoding. In theory, some of of the encoding should be possible to send to the GPU, but i doubt it will be in Tiger. Maybe in a later revision? ...The idea is tempting, if technically possible.

A while ago i did some googleing on this, and i actually found some encoding components made for GPUs. This was of course not for OSX.

Quote:

Originally posted by gelosilente

2. quartz 2d extreme is another key of tiger speed, but will these tecnology boost the speed of print too?

not the speed of the printer (is hardware, i know) but the rendering for the paper printing, that sometimes seem a bit slow on panther



hope that someone can rspond, so thank you in advance, and sorry for bad english [/B]

Hm, this is actually a good question. I guess the GPU in theory be used for some rendering, but i doubt the benifit is that big. -But i'm guessing, I'm not an expert on OpenGL and shaders.The main bottleneck in Core Image is in sending the data off to the GPU, so if you also want large amounts of data in return, this could offset any advantage.



I personally believe that Core Image will be used for much more than just applying filters in the future, but where the limit for what is feasible is, I can't tell.

kickaha

You'd be amazed what GPUs can be made to do... we have a research group here at UNC that does all sorts of physical simulations directly on the GPU, with the results being placed directly in the frame buffer and blitted to screen. They're getting insane speeds for things like cloud simulations, a couple orders of magnitude better than traditional programming on the CPU of the same machine.



If Apple chooses to make a general purpose GPU API, it would be a MASSIVE win for the scientific modeling community... and a big win for games too, I imagine.

gregmightdothat

Compression techniques tend to require lots of branching logic, not a particular strength of GPU's. Such a technique would be really hard to program, and would probably still be slower than the CPU.



GPU's are great for pararallel processing of vector data, but they're not a replacement CPU by any means.



I have no idea about printing. I'd say no, because I believe printing just converts your documents from pdf to postscript so that your printer can read it, but I'm not sure. Again, that's a branching-logic type thing if that's the case.

hmurchison

Don't be suprised if you see Apple move future versions of Core Audio onto the GPU as well or at least portions of it. The UAD-1 card (Audio DSP accelerator) is actually on old video card. Or check out what BionicFX is doing. As Kickaha says, it's amazing what a GPU can do.





I think things only get better in the future.