GPU Transcoding Throwdown: Elemental's Badaboom vs. AMD's Avivo Video Converter

jmke · 16th December 2008, 00:09 [**jmke**]

Last year, NVIDIA introduced it's CUDA development package. Existing as a stand alone download for a while, eventually CUDA was rolled in to the driver itself. Today, AMD is following suit rolling their own GPU computing package, called ATI Stream, into their Catalyst 8.12 driver. While the package has been available for a while now, AMD is really starting to try and push forward on the idea of using their hardware as a GPU computing platform. In both market penetration and branding, AMD is way behind NVIDIA and CUDA.

NVIDIA has been pushing forward in the HPC market very well with CUDA, and PhysX on the desktop uses CUDA to implement hardware accelerated physics. While AMD is a bit behind, we don't see them as hugely lagging either. NVIDIA has some good ground work laid, but the market for GPU computing is still incredibly untapped. Both AMD and NVIDIA are in a good position to take advantage of GPU computing efforts when OpenCL and DriectX 11 come along, and we really do see this effort by both camps to sell GPUs using stream computing as a pitch that is very preliminary.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3475

jmke · 16th December 2008, 00:15 [**jmke**]

Quote:

And since when is video transcoding not a deterministic process? While working with our Star Wars clip, we noticed that our files weren't all the same size. Our first thought was that maybe when running on different video cards the transcoder operated differently. But after extended testing, we discovered that we don't always get the same output even if nothing changes. Not only do two different cards not output the same data, but one card isn't guaranteed to give you the same result from run to run.

This, on top of all the other issues, makes any performance comparison moot.

jmke · 16th December 2008, 00:15 [**jmke**]

ouch... that is really not a very good showcase of GPU encoding