Today we had a chance to talk with Nero about an upcoming update to their Nero Move It software that will enable quite a few new features as well as support for accelerated transcoding using NVIDIA GPUs.

The Nero Move It software is an application set that allows a user to collect, organize, publish and transcode multimedia files to and from various devices.  It works with your desktop as well as numerous portable devices like the PSP, Blackberry and iPhone.  The update for the software, free to existing owners, will introduce CUDA support. 
 
Nero Move It brings GPU acceleration with CUDA - Graphics Cards 6

Nero Move It brings GPU acceleration with CUDA - Graphics Cards 7

In what is obviously a similar style to how Elemental Technologies Badaboom! application works, Nero utilizes NVIDIA GPUs to drastically increase the speed of video transcoding using the CUDA architecture. 

Nero Move It brings GPU acceleration with CUDA - Graphics Cards 8

There are a couple of Nero-created reference results below to show us how much faster the conversion process actually is between a high-end quad-core Intel CPU (3.0 GHz Core 2) and various GPUs. 

Nero Move It brings GPU acceleration with CUDA - Graphics Cards 9

Nero Move It brings GPU acceleration with CUDA - Graphics Cards 10

You can see that even with a very modest GPU in your system like the 9600GT, the speed of the video transcode process can go up as much as 250% over a basic dual-core CPU.  One test  case that was run partially during the conference call tested a quad-core CPU and the GTX 280 GPU converting Apollo 13 for a mobile device; it took 2 hours, 11 minutes and 34 seconds on the CPU and only 34 minutes and 4 seconds when running on the GPU.

Interestingly, CPU usage on the system while GPU transcoding was actually higher than when using the CPU alone.  Contrary to how you might view that at first, this simply means that the CPU is more efficiently utilized with GPU acceleration than without it – at least on Nero’s software.

Nero Move It will run you just $39 and is available both online and in retail stores.  The update to enable NVIDIA GPU acceleration will be available on April 20th and will be free. 

With more and more applications adopting the power the of the GPU to speed up computing, both NVIDIA and AMD have strong potential for additional GPU market growth.  And even though we at PC Perspective have been harping on the power and need for a cross-platform programming initiative like OpenCL, it’s hard to argue that CUDA has given NVIDIA’s GPUs a good sized head start.