Video Transcoding over the GPU

A new trend in GPU development is using the GPU for things other than rendering games. Parallel processing aka Stream processing. ATI uses ATI Stream and NVIDIA uses CUDA. As the topic now slowly becomes more familiar we feel now would be a good time to start collecting data that measures the performance of the GPU while computing and crunching numbers.

One of the most definitive functions the GPU will be and can be used for, is video transcoding. So we sought an application that can transcode video files over both the CPU and GPU.

Below you can find the first results of this new test. In this test we transcode a 200 MB AVCHD 1920x1080i media file to a 1280x720P MP4 binary.

Now you have to forgive me the lack of results here as this was a last minute thing that popped into my mind. So here we see the result of video transcoding. The numbers are the seconds it takes to finish transcoding; the lower, the better.

As you can observe, the GPU is very well suited for this process. In fact when we look at the 5850 and 5870 which is utilizing ATI Stream, it beats a Core i7 965 with its four CPU cores overclocked to 3.75 GHz. Think about that for a second and realize how insane that really is.

The Radeon HD 5850 and 5870 definitely rock when it comes to transcoding. Also as we now have learned, our software is not multi-GPU capable.