Micro Star International announced that, starting with November 2008, all its series of GeForce 8 and GeForce 9 graphic cards would be bundled with a trial version of the new TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress Video Encoder with NVIDIA CUDA technology. The bundled software will be a special 30-day/non-limited transcoding trial version. The TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress will benefit from CUDA's capabilities to offload the processing required for the software from the CPU to the graphics-processing unit (GPU). Compared to the CPU-only setup, the software is stated to gain up to 446 percent in performance on the MSI N260GTX-T2D896 graphics card.

NVIDIA's CUDA technology is a C language environment for the GPU capable of quickly solving computation problems using GPU multi-core/many-cores parallel processing capabilities. NVIDIA already shipped over 100 million CUDA&trade-enabled GeForce 8 Series and higher GPUs, which is the widest installed base of general-purpose, parallel-computing processors to ever be created. The latest generation of MSI N280GTX-T2D1G-OC series features built-in 240 processor cores, a great amount when compared to a four-core high-end CPU. The massive processing power of the GPU can handle any process which can be divided into multiple elements and run in parallel.

“MSI is pleased to be working with Pegasys and its TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress encoding software with NVIDIA CUDA technology. This technology is a huge step forward in video processing. Consumers are just beginning to see the results of tapping into the many-cores parallel processing power of an NVIDIA GPU. As Pegasys continues to transfer more of the processing functionality to the GPU, we will continue to see dramatic results that benefit video enthusiasts and casual home movie users looking for simple and fast ways to edit, share, and enjoy HD video base on the most powerful MSI graphics cards,” said Jason Lee, global marketing manager of MSI.

NVIDIA CUDA technology has been incorporated by Pegasys into its TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress flagship video encoding software. “Bundling our TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress Video Encoder with the NVIDIA GeForce graphic cards from MSI will give their customers a glimpse into the incredible graphics processing power that CUDA technology offers. We have been able to use this technology to offload the video decoding and filtering processes onto the GPU and we look forward to working further with NVIDIA to expand the GPU&javas processing power to include encoding functions, as well,” said Tak Ebine, Pegasys CEO.

Starting with November this year, a special trial version of TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress with CUDA technology will be made available for those that acquire MSI GeForce 9 or GeForce 8 series graphics cards.