Avidemux encoding GPU suggestions please

[avilon]

 

Does encoding Avidemux x264 and HEVC (x265) codecs support GPU?

Any suggestions of budget $100-200 graphic cards for this task?

 

Presently I have spare Graphics adapter PCIE16 GT1030 2GB GDDR5 GV-N1030SL-2GL GIGABYTE

And CPU Core i5-13400 including GPU UHD 730

 

There is also available Intel  Arc A750 8 GB GDDR6 256 bit PCIE 4.0, is this GPU a better option for video software decoding?

(I have read opinions that Intel hardware encoding quality is not as good as software.)

 

 

[eumagga0x2a]

Does encoding Avidemux x264 and HEVC (x265) codecs support GPU?

No, these both encoders are software encoders that work purely on the CPU.

Presently I have spare Graphics adapter PCIE16 GT1030 2GB GDDR5 GV-N1030SL-2GL GIGABYTE

GT 1030 lacks video encoder units and therefore cannot be used with "Nvidia H264" and "Nvidia HEVC" hw encoders.

And CPU Core i5-13400 including GPU UHD 730

That one should work with VA-API-based encoders "Intel H264" and "Intel HEVC".

There is also available Intel  Arc A750 8 GB GDDR6 256 bit PCIE 4.0, is this GPU a better option for video software decoding?

A GPU, no matter which one, has nothing to do with software decoding (decoding done on CPU).

Please be warned that while Avidemux using libva (the library exposing video functionality of the graphics hardware via VA-API to applications) on Intel and AMD platforms for both decoding and display saves some energy when purely watching video by keeping uncompressed pictures in the graphics card, re-encoding always requires download of decoded pictures to the main memory which significantly reduces gains or even lets hw accelerated path fall behind the software one with multi-threaded decoding enabled. There is some major inefficiency in memory transfer from GPU to main memory on Intel platforms, a problem which doesn't exist with NVIDIA.

I have read opinions that Intel hardware encoding quality is not as good as software.

Hardware encoders are generally worse at quality and especially at compression rate compared to software encoders, but as a rule orders of magnitude faster and even more energy-efficient.

Any suggestions of budget $100-200 graphic cards for this task?

Wait a year or look for a used RTX 3050? Except for missing AV1 encoding capability, this is IMVHO an excellent option especially for video encoding (and it can decode AV1 in the GPU). Else look for anything Turing-based 7th gen which has got NVENC cores.

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new#geforce

[eumagga0x2a]

I actually missed that you were asking specifically for Windows. For Windows, scratch everything except NVIDIA. On Windows, we don't have the luxury of a sane API like VA-API for Intel on Linux. As far as I am not mistaken, QSV cannot be used when cross-compiling Avidemux while I cannot build Avidemux for Windows natively, and the interface is in a transition phase which cuts off support for older Intel processors (and I have only older Intel processors). So no hw accelerated video encoding with Avidemux on Windows on Intel for time being, quality code contributions welcome.