Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Today, we are going to discuss both of these technologies as well as benchmark a couple video transcoding applications from Cyberlink that support both CUDA and ATI Stream platforms. We will also take a brief look at ATI's Avivo video converter to see what ATI's own free software has to offer."

With AMD's recent release of an x86 compatible SDK for OpenCL, it is only fitting to see someone pit the two GPGPU platforms against each other to see if either provides a significant advantage. Both platforms perform admirably, and the most important thing to take away from the article is that if you do a lot of rendering or transcoding, investing in a GPGPU can save you buckets of time, freeing your computer up for more important things like posting tweets or playing Music Catch.

"The idea with GPU computing is to take highly parallelized tasks typically run in the CPU and offload them to the GPU, where they can run more quickly and efficiently. Programmable shaders are exceptionally well-suited for floating point-intensive tasks. Each shader operates as its own sort of processor core, so instead of having four or eight threads crunching on a parallelized task in the CPU, you could have 64 or 320 or however many stream processors tackling the same work in the GPU."

It took nearly two years for AMD to come out with a response to NVidia's CUDA platform and even at that, when ATI Stream was first released it was severely limited. AMD has finally released an update that puts ATI Stream much more in line with the competition. Toms Hardware takes the update for a spin and finds that there are still a few parts that need polishing. It's great to see GPUs getting more use since their parallel processing capabilities are astounding, CUDA still seems to have a considerable edge for varying applications which along with video and image processing can also do things such as PhysX.