Leadtek intros SpursEngine-packing PCI-E card

Well, it looks like Toshiba isn't just keeping its Cell-based SpursEngine chip confined to its laptops and super-resolution DVD players, as Leadtek has now also taken the wraps off a PCI-E card that'll let you add some of that "faster than real-time" HD video transcoding to your desktop PC. Dubbed the WinFast PxVC1100, the card promises to encode and decode H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video with ease (and entirely in hardware), and it includes 128MB of 1.6GHz XDR memory to aid in the process. Just don't expect it to come cheap, as the card's apparently set to demand ¥30,000 (or $286) when it hits Japan later this month.

[Via Custom PC]

[StalematE @ Oct 3rd 2008 1:41PM]

as a bonus... it doesn't come with any ports......

[nerdtalker @ Oct 3rd 2008 1:53PM]

Why do you need ports for an add-in processor daughtercard? The whole point of this thing is that it's a cell (really a cell-derivative) CPU you can offload appropriately designed software to. HD encoding, decoding, e.t.c.

It doesn't _need_ ports.

[Preda @ Oct 3rd 2008 1:54PM]

What ports would it need? It is a processor.

Although have an extra rs232 or rs485 would be nice.

[d00b @ Oct 3rd 2008 3:04PM]

The main factor with any of these types isn't so much the hardware, but the software support. If it can accel at the codec level (I'm mainly thinking of the open-source X264), and doesn't require running its own app, then the $300 price is palatable for the hardcore encoder.

Regardless, this sort of thing is limited to niche use, and with a finite time window (like the Ageia). If HTPC is going mainstream, then hardware H.264 encode will be incorporated into GPUs and this card will be superfluous.

[Shinigami @ Oct 4th 2008 5:34AM]

Okay guys, I want this question to be up and shining:

How is this thing better than AMD/ATI HD 4870 for anyone other than video coders?
How is this thing better than hardware coding using Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 and CUDA?

Because I have a weird feeling we're being ripped off $286 for something we don't really need...



On the other hand, I never used such cards and I guess I won't need this thing either.

[StalematE @ Oct 3rd 2008 1:42PM]

nm, i'm an idiot

[nerdtalker @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:10PM]

At last, the #1 way to get high ranked on engadget!

[NST @ Oct 3rd 2008 1:49PM]

I wonder how fast encoding to H.264 can be, doing this on hardware. Anyone care to give an estimate for a movie DVD?

[Alex @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:06PM]

A similar card as this one was tested (1.6 Ghz 128MB, roughly half the processor speed of the PS3 which is 3.2Ghz) and it was 200% faster than a quad Core2 (OCed Q6600).

I'll venture to say that @ $300 it is still cheaper than getting 8 cores running which would require you to go to Xeon CPUs since there is no LGA775 Core2 dual board. The Intel BOXD5400XS board is $625 alone and we can safely assume that even if you have a quad core CPU it is a Core2 775pin so now you got to get 2 Xeons to stick in that LGA771 board.

By the time you are all set with the new board (some new memory possibly as well)and the dual quad core Xeon CPUs you are racing really fast towards a $2,000 bill or (more).

This card gives you $2,000 performance for $300.
I'm sure most of us could find a good use for the $1,700 we save without too much problems.

[Wwhat @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:32PM]

Yeah but this can only do what they let it do, whereas a beefy system can do more things.
And unfortunately the past has shown this kind of project never ends well, what if you don't like the parameters available for the HD encode? Then you have a useless card. Or what if the project is abandoned by leadtek soon after release? Another waste. Or if it doesn't support 64bit OS's? etc. etc.

[loosely_coupled @ Oct 3rd 2008 3:02PM]

This thing is mostly worthless. It is NOT a conventional Cell chip, it's been heavily neutered in SIMD cores and Mhz.

[Jake @ Oct 3rd 2008 4:14PM]

@Alex

It's not just half the clock speed, it's got les SPE's (4), and each SPE has less local store. It's about 1/10th of a PS3 Cell in real world terms. Still pretty sweet a 200x faster than a Core 2 Duo running optimised code. That makes a PS3 Cell 2000x faster than a Core 2 Duo...

[John @ Oct 3rd 2008 5:02PM]

"Optimized code" with regards to the cell processor is not exactly simple; you have to figure out which functions to offload, what data to send between SPEs, unravel loops to make the best use of vector processing.... it's not impossible, but it's not like your regular old apps will suddenly be going superspeed on you.

[Crushtest @ Oct 3rd 2008 5:20PM]

@Jake, Alex wrote 200% faster (=2x the speed) not 200x faster. 200x would be a major technological leap forward, and such leaps just dont happen in such a short span of time.

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Oct 4th 2008 8:52PM]

Considering the asking price for what you get for $286, it seems a bit high compared to a what a basic PS3 gives you for a few dollars more-
a BLU-RAY Drive, RSX Chip w/256mb (same as x2 7800GTX), 7 SPEs (vs 4), 3.2GHz (vs 1.6), 256MB XDR (vs 128), HDMI, and a BlueTooth-USB Game Controller.

It just seems to me, they could make and sell this card for much less money create (develop) a larger market for it in the process; hence attracting a heap of developers to write programs for it that in turn would further expend the market for this device

. I Just hope they have success with it, it sure looks nice but I won't be buying one until they address some of the issues I mention and release a F@H client and Physics SDK.

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Oct 5th 2008 12:42AM]

Forgot to mention you (obviously) also get a HDD with your PS3, a $50 value.

[Curacao @ Oct 3rd 2008 1:57PM]

Anyone remember the Ageia card????

[CaramelZappa @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:02PM]

You mean $200-$300 card whos advantages are also in all of this and last generation Nvidia cards? Yea, I remember.

[ArcticFox @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:03PM]

This isnt a physics accelerator though, this is infinately more useful than a physics processor.

[Taylor @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:20PM]

Phys-x or whatever it was called? Yeah, they got bought by nvidia, all nvidia graphics cards support their physics engine now. Worked out for them.
-Taylor

[Curacao @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:24PM]

Yes the Ageia card wich i bought at the full price when it came out, cause it promised a new era in gaming. Wich i'm still waiting for. Same as the 8800 GTX then cam out the 9800GX2 wich short after buying it, was smashed by the newer 200 series. Now 8800 sold, 9800GX2 barely hangin on for dear life, getting slower after every new game release. And the ageia...? Blowing hot air in my case, and keeping my PSU eating those watt's. Hoping one day that one game that need it's services again. LOL Makes me remember the good old day's of the Adlib sound card. LOL.

P.s. Wich also was PULVERIZED by Soundblaster.

[Nate @ Oct 3rd 2008 6:03PM]

@Curacao

Let me save you some time and frustration in the future.

Don't buy every frigging GPU that comes out. They are never worth the money when they come out, and NEVER worth the money when you already have a GPU from the previous generation. This also goes for CPU's.

[Faar @ Oct 6th 2008 12:56AM]

Erm... This card is nothing like 2-bit Ageia's PPU. It's being made by Toshiba, which is easily one of the largest and most well-known corporations on this planet. Chances are Toshiba spends more on toilet paper alone each year than the entire turnover of Ageia. :P

This board might still be a dead-end product - but not because it mirrors the Ageia PPU in some way, because it doesn't.

[pball_inuyaha @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:04PM]

Too bad this isn't cheaper cause this would be great for older computers that can't quite keep up with hi-def play back. To bad my older computer doesn't have a pci-e slot, only some pci and a CNR which I have no clue what that's for.

[Taylor @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:21PM]

At this price it's cheaper to just buy a new motherboard and processor than an add-on card.
I know that's why you were saying too bad it's cheaper, i'm just chiming in.
-Taylor

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Oct 4th 2008 8:42PM]

CNR = Communications and Network Riser.

Basically it was a slot that promised cheap peripherals that never really caught on, because it was the same price or cheaper to get a standard PCI card. Considering that you have a CNR slot, chances are your computer is a Pentium 3 with a 810 or 815 chipset using PC100 or PC133.

[GreezyG @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:08PM]

I have the ElGato Turbo.264 for my mac. It is USB and does the same thing, and was only $100. True the source wasn't HD, but I encoded all 10 hours of Band of Brothers from VOB to ipod format, it only took 6 hours.

[iamsoinsane @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:38PM]

wait, lemme get this straight.... your comparing an External USB encoder... to a Cell based card with 128 megs of XDR memory thats clocked at 1.6 GHz...
It took 6 you hours converting ipod videos.... and your proud it only cost $100?.... ouch...

[GreezyG @ Oct 3rd 2008 4:04PM]

6 hours converting 10 hours of video is "faster than real time" just like this card. $100 is cheaper than $286.

[John @ Oct 3rd 2008 5:05PM]

except that you presumably converted 480p MPEG2 to to QVGA H.264, and this is for HD decoding... different ballpark, pal.

[Curacao @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:28PM]

Yes the Ageia card wich i bought at the full price when it came out, cause it promised a new era in gaming. Wich i'm still waiting for. Same as the 8800 GTX then cam out the 9800GX2 wich short after buying it, was smashed by the newer 200 series. Now 8800 sold, 9800GX2 barely hangin on for dear life, getting slower after every new game release. And the ageia...? Blowing hot air in my case, and keeping my PSU eating those watt's. Hoping one day that one game that need it's services again. LOL Makes me remember the good old day's of the Adlib sound card. LOL.

P.s. Wich also was PULVERIZED by Soundblaster.

[Frankenstein Black @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:29PM]

Can it help run Crysis?

[Wwhat @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:35PM]

Well, if you are encoding HD while playing crysis this would certainly help :)

[pretol @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:32PM]

You have to be some serious encoder to justify 300 bucks for an encoder card. For a casual user, the DRIVER/SUPPORT fiasco is not worth it. I'd rather do all of that in my CPU, knowing that I don't need to do jack shit to set it up, and can use whatever encoding software I want without worrying about compatibility.

[Eric @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:32PM]

This might actually work out well for the NES HTPC I am building. I am going to put a Mini Itx 2.0 mobo from via in it and that has a pci-e 16x slot and I was thinking an nVidia 9500 that is passively cooled. If thing actually performs well I wouldn't need that though.

[Curacao @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:33PM]

Yes the Ageia card wich i bought at the full price when it came out, cause it promised a new era in gaming. Wich i'm still waiting for. Same as the 8800 GTX then cam out the 9800GX2 wich short after buying it, was smashed by the newer 200 series. Now 8800 sold, 9800GX2 barely hangin on for dear life, getting slower after every new game release. And the ageia...? Blowing hot air in my case, and keeping my PSU eating those watt's. Hoping one day that one game that need it's services again. LOL Makes me remember the good old day's of the Adlib sound card. LOL.

P.s. Wich also was PULVERIZED by Soundblaster.

[kal326 @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:40PM]

But at that price couldn't you just pick up one of the newer ATI or NVidia cards that aids in HD decoding as well? For $286 you could pick up a pretty decent card and have quite a but more usage out of it then just encoding/decoding. I see this going the way of the stand alone Aegis card. Started off about the same price and eventually was deprecated due to having a graphics card that costs as much share the work and then some.

[Ridgecity @ Oct 3rd 2008 5:57PM]

there this thing called Badaboom it that nvidia is testing in Beta, which uses the GPU to encode. A dvd to iphone takes about 9 minutes in a core 2 duo...

[Zack @ Oct 3rd 2008 6:34PM]

@Ridgecity

I

[RijilV @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:43PM]

If they bundled this with a netflix account I'm sure they'd sell more...

But in all seriousnes, I wonder about drivers for Linux. $300 isn't as bad as people are making it out to be depending on how fast it really is.

[Curacao @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:46PM]

My point exactly. LOL

[Sizer @ Oct 3rd 2008 2:53PM]

This is actually kind of neat - the Cell is a media crunching monster. I think it's far more suited to this kind of thing, or supercomputing, than it is for writing games on.

Though as somebody else said, I'm not sure if this is more practical than just using CUDA on your graphics card.

[aznofazns @ Oct 3rd 2008 3:19PM]

Exactly... if you already dropped a few hundred bucks on a high end graphics card like a 4850/4870/9800/8800/GTX260/280... you're probably not going to need more than that to play HD video.

[Alex @ Oct 3rd 2008 3:42PM]

This card does have competition from Nvidia Cuda and ATi graphic cards.

Some may say that having Nvidia onboard with a winning product like CUDA capable GPUs that can accelerate video/photo editing (and other apps) is good.

Look at the Adobe CS4. Photoshop CS4 will work with any CUDA based card but Premiere and After effects will require a Quadro card.
Talk about a way to scam consumers out of more $$$.

So let me get this straight while a Quadro card is typically based on a regular GeForce card (with some small tweaks to the firmware and perhaps more specialized OpenGL drivers) we now have to get one to do video editing?

http://forums.legitreviews.com/post122190.html
http://apcmag.com/adobes_new_cs4__finally_exploits_the_true_power_of_graphics_cards.htm

Some say that you will only need Quadro for the RapidHD plugin but I think that when it is all said and done Adobe will require a Quadro card for Premiere and AE acceleration.

I honestly don't know what the thinking behind this Adobe decision is. Most video editors don't run Quadro cards. They most likely run a dedicated HD card like a BlackMagic DecLink HD Extreme.

[Kurian @ Oct 18th 2008 1:17AM]

You've misunderstood. Adobe doesn't support CUDA encoding acceleration in Premiere. Encoding is done by a 3rd party H.264 encoder plugin provided by nVidia (which will obviously be programmed to work only on a Quadro CX). nVidia provides similar CUDA plugins for other Adobe apps which you can download from nVidia's site if you give your Quadro card's serial number.

Adobe on its own supports generic CUDA GPU acceleration for some effects in Premiere and Photoshop which work on all CUDA enabled cards.

[jepzilla @ Oct 3rd 2008 3:51PM]

A PCI express x1 card (i.e., low bandwidth) with 128mb of onboard ram, for $300? Maybe this is good for video codecs, but useless for anything else. Give me CUDA or Brook+ anyday. For the same price you can get an order of magnitude better hardware from NVidia and ATI.

[scape @ Oct 3rd 2008 3:56PM]

for hardware decoding of hd, wouldn't the 50$ ati card be more ideal? this is way too niche for just hd decoding...it almost seems pointless, except for that cool heatsink and the fact that it has spurs, woot. now if this could do 1000 shaders or some billion polys or something else crazy enough that would be worthwhile to endeavor putting spurs on board...but to advertise for hd decoding? ::dew drop above head::

[SHSPVR @ Oct 3rd 2008 4:00PM]

There have been other product just like the one above and with hardware transcoding tech but funny thing was it never made it to US and frist was from Vidac (Highcost) Vmagic then Canopus Ultra Encoder X2000.
One made it to US but you can't it buy it by it self you must buy the system in order to get Dell Xcelerator.
I wouldn't count it make it way to US I can in sure MPAA and RIAA are put stop it.

[Zack @ Oct 3rd 2008 4:05PM]

When the PS3 had originally come out, the first thing I had done was throw Linux (Yellow Dog) at it. The system has only 256MB of RAM, and at the OS level, running off of the one PPC core just...needless to say...chugged hard >_<

Looking more at optimizing the kernel to use the entire Cell architecture (e.g. seven out of the eight other cores on the chip, one core being locked for redundancy by the manufacturer) I decided to ditch YDL and go for Ubuntu since it had kernels compiled to deal with the extra cores.

Long story short, after running the optimized kernel, and throwing some ENcoding jobs at it, I was...baffled to say the least.

It averaged out to encoding at ~65fps _per core_ for the whole movie...and that was from a standard dvd-rip to 1080P x264.

Some quick math and you'll see that a movie at about 90 minutes long took all of 6 minutes to encode.

Granted, this process isn't for the faint of heart (took me well over a month to get everything running) but with that kind of a performance increase over sheer optimization for the Cell...if this new card hits even half of that (since it's roughly have the Cell in a PS3) then I think for many, many people it'd be worth the ~$300 price tag.

tl;dr
The hardware can do it, but like with the advent of multi-core CPUs, the software needs to catch up to it for its true power to come through.

Just my two cents...

[smilgy @ Oct 3rd 2008 5:14PM]

any chance u know where to find a tutorial for this ? :)