What is GPU Transcode? : Othor Games

» Fri Oct 07, 2011 3:15 pm

I see GPU Transcode in my graphics options. I play on the PC and I was just wondering what that does in RAGE.

Thanks

» Fri Oct 07, 2011 4:24 am

I see GPU Transcode in my graphics options. I play on the PC and I was just wondering what that does in RAGE.

Thanks

It basically uses CUDA on Nvidia GPUs that have it to offload many of the calculations normally handled by the CPU to the GPU. It mainly helps to stream textures faster and can eliminate texture pop-ins too.

I was skeptical at first whether my 3 gen old GTS 250 1GB could make use of it, but it handles it quite nicely. Apparently they've said any Nvidia GPU made in the last 4 yrs can use it as it isn't much of a resource drain on any halfway modern GPUs with CUDA.

» Fri Oct 07, 2011 9:47 am

Rage GPU Transcoding

Since the original publication of this article we've been chatting to our engineers and can now share new information about GPU Transcoding variables that can increase your frame rates, improve in-game visual fidelity, and reduce texture streaming issues.

How GPU Transcoding Works

CUDA is NVIDIA's parallel computing architecture. It enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of the graphics card to perform tasks that would take significantly longer on a CPU. In Rage, id Software uses a compressed texture format to hold tens of gigabytes of assets in 12GB of files in the game’s virtualtextures directory. Each time a texture is required in-game it is uncompressed via DXT, a texture compression algorithm originally developed by S3 Graphics, a company known for its Savage GPUs in the late 90s.

As this process requires a significant amount of computational power, and is used every second as the player moves around the world, the CUDA GPU Transcoding feature offloads much of the work from the CPU to ensure that is completed as quickly as possible in an attempt to prevent texture streaming and pop-in issues. As the GPU has to also render the in-game graphics, the CPU is left with 25-40% of the calculations, which as you’ll see later can be tweaked to further improve streaming performance.

From an article by Andrew Burnes which can be viewed in full http://www.geforce.com/News/articles/how-to-unlock-rages-high-resolution-textures-with-a-few-simple-tweaks.