Video Encoding, Turbo-Charged

A followup to my recent cover story on graphics processor-accelerated functions beyond graphics, as well as the corresponding blog-based addendums: Jason Cross from ExtremeTech was lucky enough to get his hands on an early beta release of ATI Technologies' Avivo video encoding-and-transcoding utility (which right now outputs MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and Windows Media Video) for the company's latest-generation X1000 series of GPUs. Read through his writeup for the gory details, and check out the Slashdot post for more discussion, but I'll cut to the chase with this quote:

That's right; we're look at a minimum of 5-to-1 speed improvement over CPU transcoding speed.

That's impressive.