AMD to enable ATI Stream for Radeon HD 4000s

[SSChevy2001]

http://www.tcmagazine.com/comm...shownews=22857&catid=3

GPGPU (General-purpose computing on graphics processing units) initiatives are still in their infancy these days but with so much power lying in wait on graphics cards, both Nvidia and AMD are getting into the scene to promote their own solutions. While Nvidia has its CUDA development tools AMD has Stream and it is the latter which will get some time in the spotlight starting next month when it will be available to Radeon HD 4600 and 4800 series cards.

"ATI Stream is one of the best examples of the power of Fusion, and today's announcement is the first major step in taking this important new technology mainstream," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. "For the millions of people that have already purchased an ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics card, this is one more way we're saying thank you and helping them get more out of their investment."

Set to be enabled through the Catalyst 8.12 driver, which is scheduled for a December 10 release, ATI Stream will see the Stream Processors of Radeon cards be used for more than 'just' games. With Stream, the GPUs will be put to good use in software like the ATI Avivo Video Converter utility and application from ArcSoft and CyberLink and make demanding computing tasks run a lot faster than they do on CPUs. According to AMD, the ATI Stream SDK will be fully OpenCL compliant.

http://www.rage3d.com/articles/stream/index.php?p=1

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/831/2/

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/...puts-stream-everywhere

http://www.marketwatch.com/new...4-9546-1C7CBE3E463D%7D

ATI Avivo(TM) Video Converter using ATI Stream technology looks to be faster at converting videos and is free compared to $30 Badaboom.

1080P Video @ 29.97 fps 1 minute 31 seconds

Conversion time
HD4870 - 48sec - 720P @ 29.97 fps AVC1, 7304 kbps MP4 44100Hz 160kb/s
GTX280 - 113sec - 720P @ 29.97 fps AVC1, 7734kbps MP4 48000Hz 62Kb/s

AMD Froblins Demo
http://developer.amd.com/docum...os/pages/froblins.aspx

 

[Sylvanas]

Looks good, free and faster- can't complain about that.

 

[rudder]

Bring on the stream enabled photoshop plugins!

 

[RallyMaster]

:shocked: Free video conversion?! YES PLEASE!

No 3800 support makes me somewhat sad though.

 

[ViRGE]

A few thoughts in a generally increasing order:

1) I could have sworn that the Catalyst drivers were already GPGPU/CAL capable.

2) Oh sure, now AMD promises hardware acceleration for encoding. Just like they did for AVIVO the first time, and just like they did back in 2004 for my X800 Pro. They're proving to be very unreliable here.

3) I hope the encoding quality of the hardware accelerated AVIVO isn't utterly terrible like the current version is. Fast doesn't mean anything if you're cutting corners on quality.

4) Yay, free! It's cool for AMD to eat the cost of all of the licensing, never mind the costs of writing the software.

5) No one is going to write consumer apps for ATI's GPUs (F@H is not a consumer app, it's a research project). The Stream SDK doesn't hold a candle to CUDA, it's half-complete and still works like a research project, not a commercial software SDK. I suspect most organizations would be waiting for OpenCL, not because it's a standard but because it should be a better toolset.

 

[thilanliyan]

Encoding is better than transcoding (this is what AVIVO does) in terms of quality isn't it?

 

[ViRGE]

No. Transcoding is more or less just another term for encoding. Technically when the source material is raw, you're encoding it, while if you're moving it from one lossy format to another it's transcoding (or something like that, at least).

 

[Golgatha]

Fun stuff. Marked for looking through links later.

 

[Modular]

Hopefully they'll take advantage of this for F@H! There are obviously many, many other things that will benefit from this as well that I'm interested in, but I could never understand how the 4800 series cards weren't pulling numbers like G80 based nVidia cards in folding.

 

[tommo123]

isnt it more difficult to make use of the power of the 4000 series than the G80 cards though? (what i've learn from other forums about this topic). I kinda look at it like the PS3 v 360 - PS3 (ignore GPU) has more potential power but is more difficult to make use of it.

knowing me though - that might be totally wrong

 

[SSChevy2001]

Originally posted by: Modular
Hopefully they'll take advantage of this for F@H! There are obviously many, many other things that will benefit from this as well that I'm interested in, but I could never understand how the 4800 series cards weren't pulling numbers like G80 based nVidia cards in folding.

I don't use Folding, but doesn't the ATI client only use 320 shaders of the 4800 series?