Closer look at Elemental's GPU Accelerated H.264 Encoder

We've still got a couple of months before Elemental's software makes its official debut, but it's honestly the most exciting non-gaming application we've seen for NVIDIA's hardware.

We have already given Elemental some feedback as to features we'd like to see in the final version of the software (including support for .m2ts and .evo files as well as .mkv input/output). If there's anything you'd like to see, leave it in the comments and we'll pass along the thread to Elemental.

Elemental's software, if it truly performs the way we've seen here, has the potential to be a disruptive force in both the GPU and CPU industries. On the GPU side it would give NVIDIA hardware a significant advantage over AMD's GPUs, and on the CPU side it would upset the balance between NVIDIA and Intel. Video encoding has historically been an area where Intel's CPUs have done very well, but if the fastest video encoder ends up being a NVIDIA GPU - it could mean that video encoding performance would be microprocessor agnostic, you'd just need a good NVIDIA GPU.