For the first GPU-accelerated video transcoding application written in CUDA I expected much more from Badaboom. A simple user interface is great, but it lacks the power and customization behind it. NVIDIA has a year before Larrabee hits and you can be sure that Intel will leverage its relationships with the major codec developers (DivX anyone?) to ensure that there’s full Larrabee support right away.You can check out the full article over here.
The performance expectations are also interesting. Just as the 8800 GT is pretty much the minimum requirement for decent, speedy gaming in the latest titles, that ends up being the minimum requirement for solid transcoding performance. The GeForce 9500 GT and slower are only really upgrades if you have a slow dual-core CPU, the quad-core offerings are faster than any of NVIDIA's lower end GPUs. The 8800 GT, 9800 GTX and GTX 200 class of products all offer somewhere in the 2 - 4x range of a performance improvement over Intel's quad-core CPUs. While eight-core Nehalems will help close that gap, it's clear that GPUs are much more energy efficient for video transcoding.
NVIDIA needs to do more with companies like Elemental to make sure that launches like this don’t happen. Badaboom held so much promise but disappoints as it is nothing more than a quick way of getting some videos onto your MP3 player or game console without terrible concern for quality or features.
Elemental Badaboom GPU H.264 transcoder tested
Posted on Wednesday, August 20 2008 @ 1:00 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck