Can I Speed up my Video Processing with CUDA? And how?

If someone asks "Can I speed up my video processing with CUDA", the answer usually goes positively, since the most important advantage of NVIDIACUDA technology working on consumers' computer is to accelerate our video processing. And this article chiefly focuses on what will you benefit from CUDA and CUDA-enabled GPUs (both of these two conditions are necessary).

How to check what GPU type is on your computer?

Although NVIDIA has shipped millions CUDA-enabled GPUs into the market, you still need to check it out whether yours is in this rank.

For Windows PC:1. Right-click on desktop > 2. If you see "NVIDIA Control Panel" or "NVIDIA Display" in the pop-up window, you have an NVIDIA GPU > 3. Click on "NVIDIA Control Panel" or "NVIDIA Display" in the pop-up window > 4. Look at "Graphics Card Information" > 5. You will see the name of your NVIDIA GPU

For Apple Mac:1. Click on "Apple Menu" > 2. Click on "About this Mac" > 3. Click on "More Info" >4. Select "Graphics/Displays" under Contents list

How to find out whether you have CUDA-enabled GPU?

To find out whether a GPU is CUDA enabled you need to go visit NVIDIA's CUDA GPU page, where explicitly lists the entire CUDA enabled GPU. If your GPU is listed on, it means your computer has a modern GPU that can take advantage of CUDA-accelerated applications. Usually GeForce 8, 9, 100, 200, 400-series, 500-series GPUs with a minimum of 256MB of local graphics memory are CUDA friendly, as well as lots of TESLA, QUADRO, NVS series.

You also need to download NVIDIA Driver

Still visit NVIDIA Driver Downloads to get latest GPU driver.

While after installing NVIDIA Driver on your computer, you usually need to sacrifice around 1GB hard drive space, and is it worth of that? The answer is 100% YES.

Learning from our What is CUDA sector, we know that CUDA can work on redistributing GPU and CPU's memory to dramatically accelerate video processing and transcoding. As world-class Hardware Accelerating technology, CUDA just gives you smoother video playback, more speeding video transcoding process as well as less CPU usage.