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Microsoft Patents GPU-Accelerated Video Encoding
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has just received a patent that grants the company the rights to GPU-accelerated video encoding, which may be the primary technology that takes advantage of the horsepower of the GPU in today's consumer applications. The broad patent covers tasks to perform motion estimation in videos, the use of the depth buffer of the GPU, to determine comprising, collocating video frames, mapping pixels to texels, frame processing using the GPU, and output of data to the CPU."
The patent was filed in 2004, and there must be loads of prior art. Companies such as Nvidia and ATI have had GPU-accelerated video encoders for years now.
Regardless, this patent should never have been granted. It's all because of the patent office's massive backlog, and their decision to accept every random patent to reduce it.
No, but providing someone with a unit to calculate (for example) a transformation doesn't mean that you give them an efficient way of computing FFTs. Of course if you give them a general purpose matrix-vector multiplier then it does. In 2004 a graphics card used a fixed function unit, and today it uses a general purpose one. Assumptions about how obvious it is that other applications can be performed don't carry back to previous generations of the hardware.
I do believe that you are arguing in good faith and that you are not a troll, and I understand your argument. Here are the things which I believe were obvious (to general practitioners in the field) in the 1990s:
1. Video display and video (de)compression are essentially large linear algebra problems which lend themselves to vector processing.
2. Video display hardware will continue to improve.
3. Eventually video display hardware will become sufficiently powerful to perform video (de)compression.
The reason I believe that those were all obvious to practitioners in the field in the 1990s is because they were obvious to me in the 1990s and I wasn't even a specialist in the field. (I was, however, working on large number-crunchy stuff). I would suspect that the true experts in those fields were well aware of all three of the above points even in the 1980s.
I'll have to end my participation in this thread, now, and get back to real work...