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Transcoding in 1/5 the Time with Help from the GPU
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech's Jason Cross got a lead about a technology ATI is developing called Avivo Transcode that will use ATI graphics cards to cut down the time it takes to transcode video by a factor of five. It's part of the general-purpose computation on GPU movement. The Aviva Transcode software can only work with ATI's latest 1000-series GPUs, and the company is working on profiles that will allow, for example, transcoding DVDs for Sony's PSP."
My educated guess is, No, there won't be Linux support..
ATI was the leader in MPEG2 acceleration, enabling iDCT+MC offload to their video processor almost 10 years ago. How'd that go in terms of Linux support, you ask? Well, we're still waiting for that to be enabled in Linux.
Nvidia and S3/VIA/Unichrome have drivers that support XvMC, but ATI is notably absent from the game they created. So, I won't hold my breath on Linux support for this very cool feature.
It looks like they're using their own codec to produce MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 material. How would you get an existing, x86-only aware application to utilize the GPU, which is not x86 instruction compatible? It's a good bet that codecs will be rewritten to utilize the GPU once code becomes available from ATI, nVidia, etc.
I'd actually be willing to spend more than $50 on a video card if more multimedia apps took advantage of the GPU's capabilities.
1. On another note, as polygon counts skyrocket they approach single pixel size
This is not happening. Not anywhere (except maybe production rendering). It is far too time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive to produce huge numbers of high-polygon-count models for games. Vertex pipes are currently under-utilized in most games and applications now. Efforts are underway to allow procedural geometry creation on the GPU to better fill the vertex pipe without requiring huge content creation efforts. See this paper for details.
2. A second core that most apps don't know how to take advantage of will make this all the more obvious.
This undercuts the argument you make in the next paragraph. Also, it's not true. Both the PS3 and XBOX 360 have multiple CPU cores. It's true that current-gen engines aren't optimized for this technology, but next-gen engines will be.
3. multicore CPUs are nearing the point where full screen, real time ray tracing will be possible. GPUs will not stand a chance.
This might be true, but so what? Ray tracing offers few advantages over the current-gen programmable pipeline. I can only think of 2 things that a ray-tracer can do that the programmable pipeline can't: multilevel reflections and refraction. BRDFs, soft shadows, self-shadowing, etc. can all be handled in the GPU these days. Now, you can get great results by coupling a ray-tracer with a global illumination system like photon mapping, but that technique is nowhere near real-time. Typical acceleration schemes for ray-tracing and photon mapping will not work well in dynamic environments, but the GPU could care less whether a polygon was somewhere else on the previous frame.
Hate to break it to you, but the GPU is here to stay. Why? GPUs are specialized for processing 4-vectors, not single floats (or doubles) like the CPU + FPU. True, there are CPU extensions for this, such as SSE and 3DNOW, but typical CPUs have a single SSE processor, compared to a current-gen GPU with 8 vertex pipes and 24 pixel pipes. Finally, do you really want to burden your extra CPU with rendering when it could be handling physics or AI?