ZOTAC ZBox HD-ID11 and Next Gen ION

NVIDIA CUDA-Powered Media Encoding

A fairly common requirement for Home Theater PC users would be converting various types of HD video files to more common formats for better access to playback and portability.  Home movies shot in specialized video formats especially, often need to be converted to more common file types.  In the tests below we've taken a raw 720p AVCHD video clip and converted it to an MPEG4 clip and measured the time it took to render and compress the video.

We performed conversions with Cyberlink Power Director 8 which has built-in optimizations for NVIDIA CUDA-based processing that users can enable with a simple checkbox in the program.  We then compared conversion times between our CUDA-enabled run and the time it took for the D510 dual core Atom processor to render it on its own.

Media Encoding Stress Test and Benchmarks
Digital Video Conversion from AVCHD to MPEG4



Intel Atom - 329MB AVCHD to MPEG4 Video Conversion. Time to render:  19:19


NVIDIA Ion Assisted - 329MB AVCHD to MPEG4 Video Conversion. Time to render:  11:26

As you can see there is a stark contrast in both conversion time and system resource utilization between the NVIDIA CUDA-assisted run and the Atom-only run.  NVIDA's Ion GPU was able to lop off nearly 8 minutes from the conversion time and also free up system resources significantly, allowing the Zbox to have about 40% of its CPU resources left for other tasks.  Conversely, when the Atom D510 CPU was on it's own, CPU utilization was pegged and other than the conversion going on, the system was basically unresponsive.

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