14 DAY TRIAL // For some time now Santa Clara, California-based graphics maker NVIDIA has been actively promoting its CUDA and PhysX technologies for added quality to its line of GeForce GPUs. Currently, CUDA is adopted by a considerable number of developers, optimizing their applications for use with NVIDIA’s GPUs, consequently enabling better performance than was capable on the GPU. Since late last year, AMD has also been promoting its own GPU computing platform, dubbed ATI Stream, coming as a potential competitor for CUDA. Both technologies are currently used in some applications to optimize video transcoding, with AMD even delivering its own free software application for the process, dubbed AVIVO Video converter.
On that note, late last year, the fellows over at anadtech performed a series of competitive benchmarks and reviews, comparing AMD’s AVIVO with what was the only application for CUDA, Badaboom. Back then, AMD was far behind NVIDIA on the branding and marketing of its ATI Stream technology, but the alternative to NVIDIA’s solution was still to be taken into consideration.
Unfortunately, as the guys at anadtech discovered, rushing to put a product on the market isn’t always good for quality, as AVIVO wasn’t capable of really promoting the performance capabilities of ATI Stream. In their own words, the AVIVO video converter was a “poor application that provides little to no value in exchange for the immense frustration end users will have when trying to transcode video. It is not worth the time it takes to download or the space it takes up on your hard drive.”
Following this article, AMD updated its AVIVO Video converter, which was a good enough reason for a new review of the application, to see whether the company managed to fix the issues reported in the article mentioned above. Unfortunately, this was not the case, as anadtech revealed. Moreover, the updated review could also compare the differences in performance when using AMD hardware versus NVIDIA hardware. Basically, thanks to Cyberlink's PowerDirector and MediaShow Espresso software, which is designed to work with both Radeon and GeForce GPUs, the test results could be compared between the two hardware alternatives.
As it turns out, AMD still needs to work on its technologies and application solutions in order to provide a worthy alternative to NVIDIA’s product.