ATI, emulating Nvidia, turns its graphics chips into CPUs

[admin]

The ATI Catalyst 8.12 software driver lets ATI Radeon HD 4000 series-based cards accelerate tasks, such as converting DVD video into compressed video for smart-phone screens. The drivers would run on the 2 million graphic cards sold to date by vendors using the above Radeon graphics processor from ATI, a subsidiary of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

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To show its potential, ATI released free Avivo Video Converter software, which takes advantage of the Radeon HD 4000's graphics processors to let users convert video as much as 17 times faster at up to 720p quality, said Dave Nalasco, a technical expert at ATI, during a webcast today.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9123119&intsrc=hm_list

More info about Avivo/ATI Video Converter:

The ATI Video Converter accepts almost any video file format as a source, and outputs to many different file formats, including MPEG-1, MPEG-4/DivX, WMV and H.264/AVCâ„¢4. MPEG-2 and H.264/AVCâ„¢4 benefit from ATI Streamâ„¢ acceleration with ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 4800 and ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 4600 Series GPUs.

http://ati.amd.com/technology/avivo/technology.html

[admin]

I tested Avivo Video Converter using version 8.11, which does not include ATI Stream (GPU assisted) acceleration.

I tested Divx and DVD encoding, both using the highest bitrate possible. The input file was a XviD file of 21 minutes long (624x352), 175 MB in size.

Conversion took 2:08, CPU usage was at 100%.

Conversion took 1:39, CPU usage was at 100%.

As expected, GPU loads (as tested under GPU-Z) were 0 throughout for both encodings.

Next, I tested with the 8.12 version (both drivers and the Avivo package), which does have ATI Stream acceleration support. Using all the same settings and input file.

DVD encoding took 2:03. CPU usage was at 100%, GPU usage intermittent, jumping between 0% and 15-20% throughout the encoding.

DivX encoding took 1:36. CPU usage was at 100%, GPU usage was even more intermittent, jumping between 0% and 15-20% throughout the encoding.

Hardly world shattering results, unless I'm doing something wrong. But I suspect more will come in the future as this is the first release and all.