Holy Crap.
ExtremeTech has noted that ATI has been investing in a new graphics card architecture that enables the use of “GPGPU (general-purpose computation on GPU) applications”. The X1000 series of ATI cards support this new architecture.

Well, ET just demoed an ATI app called Avivo Transcode. This program is built to transcode video from one format to another. Aptly named, wouldn’t you say? Doh. But I digress… Anyway, in testing on a very fast Athlon 64 outfitted with a Radeon X1800 XT graphics card, it cut encoding/transcoding times down to 1/5 the total encoding time!

I’ll say that again, only slower this time…you obviously weren’t paying attention. The. Program. Encodes. Video. In. One-fifth. The. Time.

“Encoding this nearly 5-minute clip, at DVD resolution, takes about 2 minutes 17 seconds with DivX 6, with single-pass encoding at 1 megabit. Windows Media Encoder can produce a high-quality single-pass transcode to WMV9 at 1 megabit in about 4:35. Windows Movie Maker 2 takes a few quality shortcuts to produce a DVD resolution clip at 1.5 megabits in 2:05. That’s all pretty good: This is, after all, one of the fastest CPUs money can buy, paired with very fast RAM.

How fast does ATI’s new Avivo Transcode app get it done? Try 24 seconds! Okay, that’s “give or take a second,” because the MPEG-4 profile finished a 1-megabit encode in 23 seconds, the MPEG-2 and Windows Media Video 9 profiles were done in 24, and the DVD profile at 6 megabits finished in 25 seconds. That’s all at the default full resolution, too. Crunching down the output resolution by choosing the “WMV9 for PMC (Portable Media Center)” profile at 700 kilobits per second completed the job in 17 seconds.

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

I’ll say.
They go on to state that at this time the Transcode app doesn’t do audio, only allows specific pre-defined presets for encoding (single-pass encoding only, limited range of bitrate options, etc). After all, it’s a demo. Exciting stuff though! I still think there is magic involved…

In related news, the ATI X1800XT was recently overclocked to 1GHz (runs a 625 Mhz engine out of the box), and Gigabyte has been experimenting with supporting 4 GPU’s on a single motherboard.
Do the math, people. Some very interesting developments indeed…

(Via Slashdot)