It appears that graphics cards have finally found a non-gaming marketing focus: Video.

Both ATI and Nvidia have been beating the drum of video transcoding for some time, promising a far better experience in transcoding your HD and SD videos into handheld formats such as Apple's iPod/iPhone or Sony's PSP. Of course, hardware acceleration does not work without software and both ATI/AMD and Nvidia are relatively weak in this area. It is one side to demonstrate a cool technology, but you really want to have an actually retail/e-tail friendly product to create a convincing story.

Luckily, CyberLink has caught up with GPU transcoding capabilities in summer of 2007 and started to work on adding transcoding to its own software stack. One year later, we are seeing result: The company’s PowerDirector 7 Ultra ships with GPU-accelerated video transcoding.

Shuichi Takagi, CyberLink's vice president of of business development ran a demonstration on a just launched ATI Radeon 4850 512 MB, proving that the hardware and software is capable of converting four HD MPEG-2 movies into MPEG-4 simultaneously - in real time. According to Shuichi, it will take about 30 minutes to process four full-length movies and compress them into handheld-friendly 200+ MB files.

CyberLink's PowerDirector 7 Ultra is available now for $120.

View: Original Article
News source: TG Daily

Interesting news Chug.

This reminds me of another article I read that pitted a multi-million dollar supercomputer against a high-end, video-centric desktop in a medical imaging application and the latter desktop clearly beat it thanks to its GPUs. Later on, I'll see if I can track down that article.

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It took some digging, but I think I found the previously mentioned news article:

NVIDIA Tesla Borrows from Games to Advance Supercomputing

Enjoy!

This is interesting. It seems the next few yew years will be spent on making technology smaller, and writing better software or finding better combinations and uses for it, rather than inventing new pieces of equipment.
This is when technology gets fun and widely available.