*Official* NVIDIA Kepler (6xx) GPUs for HTPCs - Page 2

I think I found the answer from a Taiwanese tech site...
Unfortunately no, at least for the current driver iteration...
http://forum.pcdvd.com.tw/showpost.p...2&postcount=22
The reviewer claims the driver has substantial problems that prevent the proper handling of DD/DTS bitstreaming and only works in stereo mode.

Source

- GTX 680 (GK104): March 22
- GTX 670 Ti / GTX 670 (GK104): May
- GTX 660: Late this year
- GTX 650 (GK107): May (another source)
- GT 640 / GT 620: ? (will be 40nm Fermi rebrands)

These are just rumors.

GTX 650, the successor to GTS 450/GTX 550 Ti (much smaller PCB, no external power):

The 680 is a GK104, which means it is initially based on the GF104/114 chip (and further developed from there, of course), so concluding from that, it should bitstream just fine. The only chips that didn't bitstream so far were the GF100/110 chips.

I have it in my gaming PC, so not connected to my AVR, but i can probably connect it for testing.

Regarding 4K decoding:
The next version of LAV Video will support 4K decoding in CUVID mode without having to hack stuff together, however the hardware performance is somewhat limited, it only manages at around 37-40 fps on the sample i tried (its a rather complex file, so it may be higher on others). I don't think its a deal breaker, 50p/60p material is rather rare at 1080p already (Blu-rays only go up to 30fps)
DXVA2 modes are not yet available, possibly a driver problem, they just crash.

PS:
3840x2160 is commonly known as 4K, even when its not an 100% accurate description.

Sounds like a great HTPC card, plenty power even for demanding tasks, but no external power and small form factor.
In case the Ivy Bridge iGPU isn't enough for my needs, this looks like a good candidate.

Damn.. just bought (3) GTS 450's a while back for my rackmount triple HTPC setup. lol.. you can't win when it comes to technology advances.

I cant wait personally for someone to actually get one of these and truely test DTS-HD and True HD, when I see it (or hear it) I'll believe it!

Scheduled Delivery:
Thursday, 03/29/2012, By End of Day

..........

Not working for me. I've never bitstreamed before I used, Asus HDAV 1.3 slim. Where do I go to alter settings to get it to work. I've looked around a little but not seeing it. I've only had card installed 5 minutes its the first thing I've tried to get working.

Obviously make sure you have latest drivers installed (not saying that as a smart ass, just stating the obvious)

then, go to control panel, then sound

It will show a list of sound devices, find the Nvidia HD audio or HDMI audio, right click it and go to properties

under the properties there will be a tab that says supported formats, under here it should list DTS, Dolby Digital, DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD


whats there on yours?

I assume you are hooked directly to a receiver / AVR via HDMI and this AVR supports HD codecs correct?

Hooked directly to Onkyo 809. It only shows DTS Audio and Dolby Audio, none of the high res blu ray formats are listed in there.

could be a driver issue, not your fault possibly nvidia didn't enable the support for it yet.. if it will even ever be supported. I think the main issues with drivers or something before was the way it handled the protected audio path on some of the nvidia cards

Well for $500 and new hardware it god damn well better support lossless formats.

Last review I read on this card is that it "is a gaming card". As the compute section was disabled/left out. So many features may/may not work.

Clean install of drivers still no bitstreaming showing up in options...

I would assume the problem would be fixed when the drivers get integrated with the unified driver architecture release. I certainly hope so.

I've recently noticed that board manufacturers are starting to demonstrate non-reference overclocked versions with beefed up cooling, unfortunately they also changed the power to 8+6 pins instead of the regular dual 6 pins.

So is it a driver issue that makes this card suck for video editing?

no, it is a gaming first design and Nvidia would rather you buy a quadro card for professional work.

unlike the 570 and 580 that were very powerful for CUDA the 680 and other kepler designs will have a lot less relative power for GPU computing compared to the older much less power efficient fermi designs.

they made the kepler chips extremely efficient the kinda of loads games put on a GPU but pure compute power is really never used in gaming and as opposed to furmark or folding no game will ever really peg a GPU so Nvidia focused on gaming performance and by doing so cut the power requirements a huge amount and still made a card that is a good deal faster than their prior models.

That said, almost all "video editing" is still done on the cpu and there is nothing that specifically makes the 680gtx "bad" for video work it is just that currently the hardware h.264 encoder isn't much different that what intel Sandybridge has already and Ivybridge should be better than that too.

Nvidia will probably stick with a GPU compute focused design for the professional markets separate from the gaming focused kepler for those people that need the GPU computing power or things like SDI outputs and the like and odds are if you are only hobbiest level encoding a HTPC card and a fast intel chip will encode anything just fine without the need for specialized h.264 encoding engines or trying to use mediaspressio.

Doesn't matter how fast a CPU can be. It still isn't faster then a GPU. Video rendering with a GPU cuts the time in half. My 7970 literally renders a video in half the time the 7970 does. Which kinda makes me think the 7970 is a better buy. Main reason I got the 680 was for cuda and PhsyX. I thought cuda was suppose to be amazing for video rendering in Vegas.

Even now I'm still debating which card to keep. Gaming wise they are both pretty dam close. Played BF3 with both. Numbers stay about the same. But the fact that the 7970 can render videos better makes it a little better for my needs.

This really sucks not knowing which one to keep.

The TW reviewer is now changing his conclusion.
He said for some reason his BD software player defaulted to bitstream to his TV instead of his AVR, once he turned off TV speakers and changed the software settings to output to the AVR by default, HD Audio bitstream works.
He has confirmed support for DTS Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD...
http://forum.pcdvd.com.tw/showthread.php?t=964041

Perhaps hdtv00 might need to check the default audio settings or anything that relates to TV speakers.

I am unfortunately still waiting for the custom GTX 680 cards to be released...

waiting and watching...

Well I can't even get that far as software I don't see anywhere to tell windows to allow it in the first place.

http://oi40.tinypic.com/35aw2ol.jpg

My GTX 680 has arrived. I will be running some tests this week to check out the NVENC hardware encoder.

Note, I am not an engineer, programmer, professional hardware reviewer, etc. Just an average joe that loves HTPC and encoding uncompressed Blu-ray rips to a high quality for my iPad 1 and laptop.

Things I will be testing are:

X86 Handbrake encodes: Stock High profile settings for 1080p and 768p (for Ipad 1)

X86 Handbrake encodes: Custom profile I use for 1080p and 768p (RF 18, Reference Frames 5, RC-Lookahead 50, b-adapt 2)

NVIDIA NVENC hardware encodes: 1080p and 720p using the beta software of Media Espresso

NVIDIA CUDA hardware encodes: 1080p and 720p (numerous tests have been done on this and the quality is not too great. I may skip this entirely. If I do use CUDA for a test, I will use Badaboom).

A few questions I have are:

1) What software should I use to edit clips from an encoded movie? I can get Power Director Ultra.
2) What public file site/FTP service should I use to host the encoded movies?
3) What movies/scenes do you recommend I use to test the encoding capabilities of the 680 GTX?
4) How many minutes from the scene would be a fair assessment for each encoder?

Note, I can use the opening of Game of Thrones as the HBO intro is brutal for encoding software. Anandtech uses Casino Royale and the Dark Knight (I have both to test if needed).

Can't wait to test this card out. Hopefully in the near future, I can do the same tests against Ivy Bridge and the next-generation of Quick Sync.

Thanks!

I can't get GPU encoding to work Using Sony Vegas. Power Director does work. Super quick to.

Either way. I'm very interested in hearing what you end up doing.

Hey Jukebox,

I was reading your earlier thread and you noted the 7970 is fast. How is the quality compared to software/x86 encodes?

Also, does the current version of Power Director use the NVENC of 680 GTX or just CUDA?

Thanks!

I'm honestly not to sure. I've just noticed the the 7970 Seems to encode and render videos much faster then the GTX680.

I'm relativity new to a lot of this stuff. I just started using Power Director about 3 days ago. It's definitively fast.

So, got the 680 GTX installed and it's working great so far. I have the newest NVIDIA drivers installed and MKV playback via MPC Home Cinema, MadVR, LAV Filters work fine. I did have to un-check one setting in MadVR to get playback to work but no other issues. I will try bitstreaming this weekend as I have the 680 in my gaming PC.

The card runs quiet (about the same as my 560ti). Heat isn't an issue when I fired up World of Warcraft and MW3. I haven't tried any of the new TXAA features but will do so tonight.

However, ran into one issue. I have the beta version of Media Espresso that supports NVENC encoding but Media Espresso won't accept my uncompressed Blu-ray MKVs. It reports that it won't process the file due to the audio. It won't playback the MKVs in their player.

The MKVs can be processed in Cyberlink Media Director Ultra and Arcsoft's Media Converter 7.5 without issue. But these programs don't support NVENC at this time.

I am hoping the folks at Anandtech have better luck with getting Media Espresso to work with decrypted MKVs to test NVENC. I will try some other things and report back on encoding time and quality.

Still love to know if anyone gets it bitstreaming because I can't get mine to do it.

Just wondering if the silent stream bug is still present on the GTX 680?