Not Linux-related this time…    I should confess that I actually do use Windows 7 frequently, for HD Video processing and editing using Sony Vegas Pro and Cineform (on a stand-alone system), and for colour slide restoration using Photoshop (Win7 on VMware, on Linux)..    The reason is that – simply – there is no equivalent quality software available for Linux..    Gimp is good, but not that good, and Kdenlive, Open Movie Editor, etc. are not stable, or sufficiently functional..    And no – I don’t wish to pay out thousands for a copy of Avid for Linux!

I have had recent experience of so-called GPU options with several video processing software products (running on Win7), but – sadly – in each case (and with a fairly decent video card, from NVIDIA..) the results have been embarrassingly poor..   In each case, I reverted to CPU-only, and the performance was improved again..

Now there is an article that echoes this sentiment:

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/128681-the-wretched-state-of-gpu-transcoding

This is annoying – to say the least – and has caused many people to (effectively) waste a lot of time and effort trying to make something work that has been trumpeted as a significant performance enhancement for the companies’ software products, but in practice ends up being worse in performance terms..

This brings back memories of the so-called ‘memory-enhancement’ products back in the early days of MS Windows…