First off, Id like to say thank you for anyone’s input.
Let me clear this up on my knowledge to save time on your replies. I know what this card is designed for (double precision calculations), I know it does not have video outputs, I know how to cool it (will be installed in a rack server)(passive cooling).
That being said…This card is dirt cheap, seems to have some good horse power if it can be used. I know I can buy a normal graphics card for a sure thing, but 12GB of ram and the cuda cores on this baby seem pretty sweet. I have seen that Nvidia Maximus technology can be used if you have a Nvidia Quadro paired with a tesla card to make adobe premier run faster and decrease encoding times.
So that all being said, what do you think? Are the below listed codecs that Nvidia claims this card can do even compatible with shotcut? I do not know much about video editing, just getting into things. Honestly, I can’t tell what codecs shotcut even uses, but hevc_nvenc and h264 are listed in both the nvidia specs and the options of hardware encoding options in shotcut.
Thanks
Below are from what I can tell according to Nvidia’s website the codecs that the Tesla M40 can encode.
H.264
(AVCHD)
YUV 4:2:0 H.264
It has 5th generation NVENC. Not terribly impressive. I personally would not use it. Hardware encoding quality doesn’t get competitive with software encoders until 7th generation. Hardware encoding is performed in separate circuitry and uses virtually none of the CUDA cores, so those statistics are irrelevant to export performance.
Shotcut at this point does not use CUDA cores to any great deal for filter processing or compositing either. This could change in the future.
It could be possible to get decent hardware encoding if you’re willing to use much higher bitrates (approx. 3x higher than software encoding). But it’s still only decent, not amazing at 5th gen.
Thanks for the info, the cards are selling for only $120 bucks. In my head I was comparing the value of a card of the same price point, such as a GTX 1050 or RX 570. $120 bucks does not buy much these days, I am trying to put a card in my machine. Right now I just don’t have much of a budget for anything great.
Comparing specs between GTX 1050ti and Tesla M40 link below
The 1050 Ti still doesn’t have a recent encoder. For $160, the GTX 1650 Super is available with 7th generation NVENC. For people doing hardware encoding, that card has unbelievable value.
Having said that, if you need CUDA horsepower for other purposes like 3D or Resolve, then you’re probably looking at an RTX 2060 minimum anyway.
