New ATI graphics cards can do MPEG4 encoding?

[lump1]

I just read this (http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/02/1554238&tid=152&tid=137) on Slashdot about how ATI put out a pre-release app that can use the GPU for transcoding. Right now it doesn't have the features that would make it practical, but amazingly, the transcoding goes at least FIVE TIMES FASTER with assistance from the GPU. For those of us who spent extra money on a computer that can do encoding just a few percent faster, this is just huge!

The review article is here (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1880749,00.asp). What will this change for us serial transcoders?

[guada 2]

Hello lump 1, :)

It is very interesting, but I think that it is at the primary stage:

- enticing functions of treatment MPEG-4/H264 but limited by its of the personalized settings;
- it seems very fast efficient thus effective, but for what motherboard?
- Which technique of cooling to be used for such a card?
- Which is its price and its date of availability?

[bond]

unless they make the specs publically available and free and good codecs like x264 and xvid support it, i dont really care about using it together with some ati written, propably crap quality, codec

[guada 2]

I think a little like you Bond.
It is preferable to benefit from our manual method to this technology, a few too beautiful to my taste.

NOTE: it is my personal opinion.

[DaWolfman]

I'm hoping that ATI will include drivers for this technology that would allow codecs like X264, Ateme, Xvid, etc. to access such features. That would yield the best of both worlds.

[Doom9]

hardware sites may on occasion get speed tests right (many still don't provide all settings for reproduceability, and measure the FPS at the end of the movie or a really short clip, both of which is not very reliable), but create clips of different codecs at comparable quality? I have my doubts. I can speed up x264 or XviD a lot using speed-optimized settings, too, but quality will suffer.

[nm]

I read the Slashdot discussion on this and there were some comments suggesting that the transcoding is speeded up by implementing (parts of?) it in some shader language. If this is true, it will be possible to do the same thing in open source encoders and decoders. ATI's implementation probably needs new features currently only available on their latest GPUs, but it could even be possible to use older hardware to achieve similar results. General purpose computing on GPUs has already been used for various applications (http://www.gpgpu.org/) and there are easy programming interfaces like libsh (http://libsh.org/).

So far these efforts have been constrained by the bandwidth available to move data around. PCI-E helps, and perhaps ATI has some new tricks up their sleeves.