Power Director 7
Cyberlink's Power Director 7.0, one of few mainstream retail applications to offer NVIDIA CUDA-accelerated performance, has a handful of video effects that pledge to make the most of the GPU.
Our chosen effect, Light-ray, may not be commonly used in everyday video processing, but it gives an idea as to how much of a boost CUDA acceleration can provide. To carry out the test, we take a PAL DV video (720 x 576), apply the Light-ray effect to the entire clip at default settings, and measure the time taken to output to MPEG-2 DVD-HQ.
| Power Director 7 - PAL DV to MPEG-2 with Light-ray effect | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| GeForce GTX 260 (CUDA on) | GeForce 8800 GT (CUDA on) | GeForce 8800 GT (CUDA off) | GeForce GTX 260 (CUDA off) |
| 191.5 | 184 | 292 | 291.5 |
It's again no surprise to find that a feature dubbed as "CUDA acceleration" is in fact quicker. Quite significantly quicker, too. With Power Director's CUDA acceleration enabled, our GeForce 8800 GT system found the time taken to process the video to be 37 per cent less.
Curiously, our GeForce GTX 260 system fared a touch worse than the GeForce 8800 GT. There's very little in it, and we'd put it down to software that hasn't yet been refined to fully make use of the GTX 260's extra power.
