There are now two choices for those who want to transcode video, be it for back up purposes or so that you can watch a favourite DVD on your iPod.  nVIDIA’s Badaboom can be purchased for $29.99 and with the help of a Geforce graphics card you can encode to your heart’s delight.  AMD’s Stream comes for free with the new 8.12 Catalyst.  Once you begin to compare the quality of the two encoding processes, the obvious choice by price proves not to be the obvious choice for watchability.  Take a look at the screenshots and movies at AnandTech to see exactly what you get as a final product.

“Last year, NVIDIA introduced it’s CUDA development package. Existing as a stand alone download for a while, eventually CUDA was rolled in to the driver itself. Today, AMD is following suit rolling their own GPU computing package, called ATI Stream, into their Catalyst 8.12 driver. While the package has been available for a while now, AMD is really starting to try and push forward on the idea of using their hardware as a GPU computing platform. In both market penetration and branding, AMD is way behind NVIDIA and CUDA.”

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