Radeon HD 5970 Single card and Crossfire review - Video Transcoding over the GPU

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 towards a 1280x720P MP4 binary.

So here we see the result of video transcoding. The numbers 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 even a 5750 utilizing ATI stream shows a tremendous performance gain as it beats a Core i7 965 with it's four CPU cores overclocked to 3.75 GHz. Think about that for a second and realize how insane that really is.

Facts, any Radeon HD series 5000 will assist the transcoding process saving time, what bugs me though is that all series 5000 cards seems to scale the same. Since this software is using both the CPU and GPU for the transcode process, the 3.75 clock Core i7 processor might be the dominating factor here.