Cinemartin’s P-Module Takes Advantage Of NVIDIA Maxwell GPUs To Encode 4K H.265 At Up To 2x Realtime

When NVIDIA began pushing GPU accelerated compute some seven or eight years ago, one of the scenarios where tremendous gains were promised was video encoding. We’ve learned over time, though, that in order for benefits to be seen, a file has to be special. It either has to be very high-resolution (eg: 4K), or require the rendering of effects. Most codec-to-codec encodes rarely, in my experience, show a benefit on the GPU.

There are some exceptions, though. When I took NVIDIA’s Quadro M6000 for a spin a few months ago, I found that while 1080p encoding (with effects) didn’t change much from one GPU generation to the next, there were significant gains when 4K video was brought into the picture (120 seconds on the K5200 to 74 seconds on the M6000). It should be noted, though, that the aforementioned 1080p project on the CPU alone is about 10-20x slower than on a modest NVIDIA GPU; it’s just harder to see gains on faster and faster GPUs using the same project.

NVIDIA’s Quadro M4000

Nonetheless, the folks at Cinemartin have proven that there is lots of room for improvement in the video encoding parallelism department. The company has just introduced what it calls a “P-Module” to its encoder solution, which it says it teamed up with NVIDIA to help create. It takes good advantage of the second-gen Maxwell architecture to encode video to H.265 at up to 2x real-time for 4K, and 7x real-time for 1080p. A demo video can be seen below.

While Quadro is the obvious focus for high-end workloads, Cinemartin says that the speed-up can occur just as well on any Maxwell-based card. That’d include the GTX 950 straight through to the TITAN X. The company also notes that versus CPU-based solutions, its P-Module can improve encodes at up to 100x.

During the demo video above, the presenter mentions that codecs other than H.265 can be encoded to at enhanced speed as well, although it’s not clear if the exact same kind of performance gains will be seen. One other thing the video highlights is the fact that H.265 footage looks identical to H.264 footage – at least, based on what we can surmise from the video. The kicker? The H.264 file weighs 427MB, whereas the H.265 version slims down to 174MB.

Cinemartin says that its P-Mod will be available for its Cinec software later this quarter as a purchased add-on. There is no word of pricing as of the time of writing.