ATI/AMD today is announcing its new “Stream Transcoding Paradigm”, and showing off a lot of charts that indicate it beats NVidia quite soundly. Unlike NVidia’s CUDA or OpenGL offerings, however, this technology seems to be relegated solely to video transcoding.
The new transcoder should work on most 4000 series GPUs. The older version only used the higher-end cards, but now the compatibility matrix goes all the way down to the lowest-end 4350 – almost integrated territory there. The lowest-end cards don’t do GPU encode though, they simply don’t have the horsepower, and would be slower than a CPU.
It’s got a pretty wide compatibility spread, working on cards down to the 4350, and Video Transcoding is one of the big GPGPU uses right now. It’s nice to see ATI and AMD exploiting the fact that they build CPU’s, GPU’s, and controller chipsets to build an integrated end-to-end GPGPU solution.
