ATI Radeon HD 4890 vs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275

The Latest CUDA App: MotionDSP’s vReveal

NVIDIA had more slides in its GTX 275 presentation about non-gaming applications than it did about how the 275 performed in games. One such application is MotionDSP’s vReveal - a CUDA enabled video post processing application than can clean up poorly recorded video.

The application’s interface is simple:

Import your videos (anything with a supported codec on your system pretty much) and then select enhance.

You can auto-enhance with a single click (super useful) or even go in and tweak individual sliders and settings on your own in the advanced mode.

The changes you make to the video are visible on the fly, but the real time preview is faster on a NVIDIA GPU than if you rely on the CPU alone.

When you’re all done, simply hit save to disk and the video will be re-encoded with the proper changes. The encoding process takes place entirely on the GPU but it can also work on a CPU.

First let’s look at the end results. We took three videos, one recorded using Derek’s wife’s Blackberry and two from me on a Canon HD cam (but at low res) in my office.

I relied on vReveal’s auto tune to fix the videos and I’ve posted the originals and vReveal versions on YouTube. The videos are below:

In every single instance, the resulting video looks better. While it’s not quite the technology you see in shows like 24, it does make your videos look better and it does do it pretty quickly. There’s no real support for video editing here and I’m not familiar enough with the post processing software market to say whether or not there are better alternatives, but vReveal does do what it says it does. And it uses the GPU.

Performance is also very good on even a reasonably priced GPU. It took 51 seconds for the GeForce GTX 260 to save the first test video, it took my Dell Studio XPS 435’s Core i7 920 just over 3 minutes to do the same task.

It’s a neat application. It works as advertised, but it only works on NVIDIA hardware. Will it make me want to buy a NVIDIA GPU over an ATI one? Nope. If all things are equal (price, power and gaming performance) then perhaps. But if ATI provides a better gaming experience, I don’t believe it’s compelling enough.

First, the software isn’t free - it’s an added expense. Badaboom costs $30, vReveal costs $50. It’s not the most expensive software in the world, but it’s not free.

And secondly, what happens if your next GPU isn’t from NVIDIA? While vReveal will continue to work, you no longer get GPU acceleration. A vReveal-like app written in OpenCL will work on all three vendors’ hardware, as long as they support OpenCL.

If NVIDIA really wants to take care of its customers, it can start by giving away vReveal (and Badaboom) to people who purchase these high end graphics cards. If you want to add value, don’t tell users that they should want these things, give it to them. The burden of proof is on NVIDIA to show that these CUDA enabled applications are worth supporting rather than waiting for cross-vendor OpenCL versions.

Do you feel any differently?