Video card effect?

[codename_46]

I was talking with some people about DivX files and the subject of video cards came up. This group was saying that your video card and drivers effect how good of a job your machine can do with encoding a DivX movie. I believe that is total BS. Now I can easily see how it would effect how well you could play back a Divx video. But I can't see how your video card could have any effect on how good of a job your machine can do encoding the movie to begin with.

[communist]

Yeah pretty much BS. Video cards can do ColorSpaceConversions in hardware and some iDCT calculations (both during decoding) are done but that has about no real influence on encoding speed of MPEG4 streams. There are boards with hardware MPEG1/2 encoding support - but we're speaking of MPEG4.
Although cards with hardware support for MPEG4 encoding are coming - also see following threads:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=62079
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=74455
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=74502