ATI Gives Us A Glimpse Into the Future of Video Encoding

By David Johnston
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Today ATI has given the public a glimpse of a very exciting new application that it’s working on called “Avivo”. Avivo will allow users of ATI’s X-series of graphics cards to use the cards’ GPUs instead of their computers’ CPUs to encode video. It frankly isn’t very surprising given that graphics cards of today are incredibly powerful at the top of the line and generally sit around unused except for when you’re playing a game. ATI is finally coming up with more ways to tap that potential, and it looks like they’re doing an excellent job of it. Anyway, from an ExtremeTech report, we can already see the tremendous advantage that using the GPU for video encoding work has over the CPU. Here’s a quick summary of their test results:

So how fast is it? We shouldn’t get into serious benchmarks while the application is in such an early state, but just to give you a taste of the numbers, we ran a few tests. Our test machine was an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ with 1 GB of very low latency RAM and a Radeon X1800 XT graphics card. We encoded a test clip from the movie The Rock,—a4-minute and 50-second clip that tends to be very tough on encoders. It’s the same one we use in our CPU benchmarks.

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.

As you can see, the ATI X1800XT completely blows the very capable Athlon 64 X2 4800+ out of the water in a side-by-side comparison. This, folks, is truly jaw-dropping. Now, the only catches are that, first off, this software isn’t available yet and currently is also very limited in its functionality. On top of that, it only works on ATI graphics cards and only the X-series on top of that. The GPU also doesn’t do any audio encoding or transcoding, so the video clips have no audio to go with them. That’s probably the largest hurdle that ATI will have to jump before Avivo is ready for public consumption.

Sources: ExtremeTech via Digg.com

Click here for more info straight from ATI.