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Very, very impressive: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1880749,00.asp
I'm pretty excited about this "General Purpose" GPU stuff in general. First was protein folding showing big performance increases, then physics applications, and now video encoding.
The application currently only supports ATI's latest GPU, the R520, used in the X1800 series of Radeons.
The GPU, "Xenos" in the Xbox 360 is even more general purpose than the R520. It'll be extremely interesting to see what the developers can do with that.
I'm pretty excited about this "General Purpose" GPU stuff in general. First was protein folding showing big performance increases, then physics applications, and now video encoding.
So how fast is it? We shouldn't get into serious benchmarks while the application is in such an early state, but just to give you a taste of the numbers, we ran a few tests. Our test machine was an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ with 1 GB of very low latency RAM and a Radeon X1800 XT graphics card. We encoded a test clip from the movie The Rock,—a4-minute and 50-second clip that tends to be very tough on encoders. It's the same one we use in our CPU benchmarks.
Encoding this nearly 5-minute clip, at DVD resolution, takes about 2 minutes 17 seconds with DivX 6, with single-pass encoding at 1 megabit. Windows Media Encoder can produce a high-quality single-pass transcode to WMV9 at 1 megabit in about 4:35. Windows Movie Maker 2 takes a few quality shortcuts to produce a DVD resolution clip at 1.5 megabits in 2:05. That's all pretty good: This is, after all, one of the fastest CPUs money can buy, paired with very fast RAM.
How fast does ATI's new Avivo Transcode app get it done? Try 24 seconds! Okay, that's "give or take a second," because the MPEG-4 profile finished a 1-megabit encode in 23 seconds, the MPEG-2 and Windows Media Video 9 profiles were done in 24, and the DVD profile at 6 megabits finished in 25 seconds. That's all at the default full resolution, too. Crunching down the output resolution by choosing the "WMV9 for PMC (Portable Media Center)" profile at 700 kilobits per second completed the job in 17 seconds.
That's right; we're look at a minimum of 5-to-1 speed improvement over CPU transcoding speed. That's just huge.
Encoding this nearly 5-minute clip, at DVD resolution, takes about 2 minutes 17 seconds with DivX 6, with single-pass encoding at 1 megabit. Windows Media Encoder can produce a high-quality single-pass transcode to WMV9 at 1 megabit in about 4:35. Windows Movie Maker 2 takes a few quality shortcuts to produce a DVD resolution clip at 1.5 megabits in 2:05. That's all pretty good: This is, after all, one of the fastest CPUs money can buy, paired with very fast RAM.
How fast does ATI's new Avivo Transcode app get it done? Try 24 seconds! Okay, that's "give or take a second," because the MPEG-4 profile finished a 1-megabit encode in 23 seconds, the MPEG-2 and Windows Media Video 9 profiles were done in 24, and the DVD profile at 6 megabits finished in 25 seconds. That's all at the default full resolution, too. Crunching down the output resolution by choosing the "WMV9 for PMC (Portable Media Center)" profile at 700 kilobits per second completed the job in 17 seconds.
That's right; we're look at a minimum of 5-to-1 speed improvement over CPU transcoding speed. That's just huge.
The GPU, "Xenos" in the Xbox 360 is even more general purpose than the R520. It'll be extremely interesting to see what the developers can do with that.
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