(Anonymous)

2007-09-15 09:22 am (UTC)

Processing with the GPU, speculation & questions.

What are the chances of the specks enabling us to use the GPU for more general purpose processing? I frequently backup and compress whole harddrives of data, or transcode MPEG2 video captured from my PVR-150 to Xvid, (soon H.264) is it going to be possible to use the GPU for some/which appropriate tasks?



The Folding@Home people only support R500 series GPUs because "The X1K boards were the first to support 32-bit precision and branching/looping on the ATI/AMD side of the world" and they strongly recommend the R580 / X1900 series, as it has 48 pixel shaders, presumably the same will be true of any future GPGPU efforts?



What are the chances of H264 playback assistance, or a more general video decompression framework, on older (R300) hardware? Presumably this wouldn't require branching/looping and may well enable thousands of older PC's to perform as HD MythTV frontends.



I realise these questions are way ahead of them selves, and there's a LOT of work to do before we get to this point, but I'm just very excited (how sad is that) at the prospect.



Thank you for you tireless effort on behalf of the FOSS community



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU

http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-ATI.html