| User review:
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I upgraded to v5 but also kept my v4 (for divx authoring, which v5 lacks). Am using v5 mostly to author blu-rays and AVCHD DVDs (videos and photo slideshows). Output quality of TAW5 is pleasing, but encoding can take a long time when using CPU alone (core i7 920 2.66Ghz in my case). And with the CPU maxed out the PC slows to a crawl.
Since TAW5 has CUDA acceleration support, I decided to investigate the GeForce range of video cards and finally settled on one - the GeForce GTX560Ti 448 Core edition - that just happened to fit inside my medium-sized PC case!
With CUDA enabled, encoding blu-rays, AVCHD DVDs, and even regular DVDs became much faster. Subjectively, I estimate that encoding tasks complete in 1/4 to 1/3 of the time vs CPU alone. Output quality looks just as good to my eyes. The CPU still gets pushed fairly heavily, but with much of the heavy lifting off-loaded to the CUDA cores, Win7 remains fairly responsive to multitasking.
CUDA and TAW5 undoubtedly make a great team! |
