Feature Articles

Streaming into the Future - ATI Stream Update

By Vincent Chang - 2 Mar 2009

What about CUDA?

The Badaboom Factor

In case you weren't aware, ATI's video converter is not the first such transcoding software to utilize the GPU to such effect. Badaboom's Media Converter, which is based on NVIDIA's CUDA and hence only supported on GeForce 8 graphics cards and newer, debuted last year. Featuring a jazzy and slick interface compared to the mundane ATI Catalyst Control Center, Badaboom Media Converter is a third party application that will cost you US$30 unlike the free download for ATI's version.

Compared to ATI's utility, Badaboom Media Converter is a slick, yet simple to use utility. The basic mode is similar to ATI, with only a slider bar to indicate video quality. The source and output options are similar, though Badaboom can only output H.264 videos albeit with custom profiles for devices like iPod, Blackberry, PSP, etc.

Choosing the Advanced mode reveals many more options than ATI's utility. Of course, it's much more limited compared to full fledged encoding/transcoding software.

Badaboom took up the least CPU resources of the three programs tested, with less than 10% CPU utilization on the average.

As befitting a paid application, Badaboom looks more like your iTunes than the plain ATI Video Converter. The Advanced mode gives it more options than ATI's and from what we have tested, the CPU utilization was lower for Badaboom compared to the ATI Video Converter, which does show that it is definitely doing a better job of relieving the CPU of the transcoding task.

Initially, we wanted to pit the two competing solutions together in our testing but unfortunately, the difficulties in getting the three applications (including the CPU/TMPGEnc solution) to transcode into a similar file format, from the size to the quality proved to be harder than we expected. This was especially so since both the ATI Video Converter and Badaboom Media Converter had limited quality options and we could not find a comparable setting for both. One thing to note about the Badaboom application is that it only outputs H.264 video files and it did not support WMA Pro format as input, which made it even harder to find common ground for both applications.

Since it would not be very fair to compare the two head-to-head when the output settings cannot be made equal, we will only compare Badaboom against the Core i7 used in our test system. For the GPU, we went with the GeForce 9800 GTX+ (ForceWare 182.06), which is in a similar performance bracket as the Radeon HD 4850. The output files for both applications were H.264 with a bitrate of 4Mbps and with the audio settings of 48KHz, 128kb/s bitrate. We used Badaboom version 1.1.1.

While the CUDA enabled Badaboom did take less time than the CPU to complete, it was not as impressive a margin as we had anticipated. Of course, the output files were not a like-for-like comparison so the time taken should just be taken as a rough gauge on what to expect from it.

Final Thoughts

If there's anything to take from our hands-on testing with these two transcoding software, it's that they have much potential. Both performed better than the CPU, even if the interface and options for the ATI Video Converter left much to be desired. ATI's version in particular seemed like a work in progress, with the occasional crashes and the less than accurate file size estimates.

Although the Badaboom Media Converter beats ATI easily for presentation and transcoding options, it does cost some money unlike the free ATI one. And we all know that to users who are unfamiliar with the whole technology, it's not the easiest of tasks to get them to fork out the cash for something new and untried, not to mention the prerequisite of having a GeForce 8 series or above GPU.

Returning to the topic of ATI Stream, some of the mainstream consumer applications that ATI has talked about last year have already made their debut but unsurprisingly, they support both NVIDIA's CUDA and ATI Stream. This situation is likely to be the norm in the future with OpenCL and we await the official support for this open standard from ATI. Stream computing may not matter yet but we believe that it won't be the case very soon.

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