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At the end of last year, we took at look at video encoding performance on the CPU, Nvidia GPUs, and ATI GPUs. In that article, we couldn’t provide an apples-to-apples comparison. Simply put, there was no application to transcode video that supported Nvidia’s CUDA, ATI Stream, and was also well optimized for CPUs. Now, there is.

Cyberlink sells a $40 app called MediaShow Espresso that is basically an easy-to-use, consumer oriented video transcoder. It takes video input from a wide range of formats and exports it based on device profiles. There are profiles for various kinds of iPods/iPhones, Zune, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PSP, etc. Most importantly, the app is optimized to utilize CUDA on Nvidia GPUs, ATI Stream on ATI GPUs, and includes robust CPU optimizations including Core i7 tweaks.

Now we have the opportunity to use one affordable consumer application, with all the same settings and formats, to compare video transcoding between a fast CPU, a fast Nvidia GPU, and a fast ATI GPU. Continued…