GPU Computing

GPU computing is something which is fast becoming a very important feature on "video" cards. NVIDIA have a number of useful utilities for CUDA enabled cards which all help to enhance the performance of day to day tasks. On the AMD front we have "Stream" applications which use the GPU to enhance performance. Here we have taken an example of the different technologies at work to find out how the card benefits us in real world use.

GPU Assisted Media Conversion
Our media encoding test takes a 4GB 1920x1080 file and converts it with Badaboom and MediaExpresso to iPad format with GPU assistance.

In this test both systems perform the conversion faster than realtime with the Radeon just edging out the GTX 560. That said, one of the key strengths of the 560 is that it supports Badaboom which offers better image quality on converted media than the competition... so despite the 3s gap in performance the GTX solutions is more desirable thanks to the higher IQ when playing back the conversion.

Here are two short examples which demonstrate this quality difference.

Badaboom Example - DOWNLOAD
Cyberlink MediaExpresso Example - DOWNLOAD