Back when we reviewed the new high-end X1800 cards from ATI, we made particular note of ATI's investment in making its new chip architecture shine in GPGPU (general-purpose computation on GPU) applications. That is, using the power of the graphics chip for compute-intensive tasks other than graphics. Many of these tasks are things that everyday computer users simply don't do much of?fluid dynamics equations, protein folding, and other stuff like that. But there's one such task that is already extremely common, and it's growing more so every day?video transcoding. Do you take your videos and translate them to MPEG-4 or H.264 to put them on your PSP? Squash down your DVDs to fit on a CD, or backup those dual-layer DVDs to a single-layer DVD-R disc? Archive your video collection so you can watch all your stuff from your PC without fumbling for discs? Edit together home movies?

If you've done any of this stuff, you're probably painfully aware of the fact that it takes forever to transcode video from one format to another. Well, ATI has a solution coming soon in the Avivo Transcode application.

ExtremeTech