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We’ve been hearing a lot about the benefits of performing computationally intensive tasks on the graphics processor, rather than the CPU, for quite some time now. To date, there has been very little traction in this area for the general consumer.

Sure, the high performance computing market that uses “big iron” supercomputers to solve enormously complex problems have begun to utilize the power of the GPU in a big way, but there’s not a lot you can do at home outside of folding@home, interface enhancements in the latest version of Photoshop, and one or two games with GPU-accelerated physics.

One of the most compute-intensive activities undertaken by the general consumer market is video transcoding—the act of changing a video file from format to another. It is this area that is one of the beachheads of the GP-GPU war, with ATI and Nvidia fighting to provide the best reasons to own one of their cards outside of better game performance and compatibility.

Recently, a third-party company called Elemental Technologies released a consumer video transcoding application called Badaboom that uses any CUDA-capable Nvidia GPU to accelerate the process. Version 1.1 adds support for many formats and new output profiles. The app costs $30, with a limited trial version available.

Not to be outdone, ATI has included a free GPU-accelerated video transcoding tool in the Catalyst 8.12 drivers called the Avivo Video Converter. This free tool is built into the driver itself, accessible through the Basic View of the Catalyst Control Center.

We’ll compare these two GPU-accelerated transcoding tools, looking at performance, usability, and quality of the resulting video files. As a baseline, we’ll examine a free CPU-based transcoding application, WinFF. This free tool is based on the ffmpeg library. Continued…