Woody Hayday

CUDA on Nvidia cards rocks. This box’s ATI was hardcore about 9 months ago, but even though the latest ATI card’s are the world’s best in performance, and by no means bad, NVIDIA’s CUDA changes anything for anyone who uses a pc for more than facebook. SUPER is a video converter that does prettymuch every type of video to any other type of video, its good, but its slow. Dreadfully slow. I have the best AMD from 9 months ago, which dispute its flaws is no small chip but encoding video takes an absolute age.

After seeing a post (cant find it now typically) last week on tricking software into using the gpu instead of the cpu for doing things like 3D renders I randomly did a search not knowing anything about GPU video converting – turns out theres already software in market. Badaboom converts video using any CUDA friendly nvidia graphics card, at a supposed 20 x the speed. ATI’s version – Avivo has a ton of mixed reviews on the net, people saying it doesnt even use the GPU it uses the CPU, I am not sure either way – but DAMN CUDA is an ace in the hole for Nvidia.

With real time rendering engines, video converters and scientific modelling software already using and abusing the GPU what will this mean for the Personal Computer of the 2010’s? More to the point are ATI going to follow them down this path? I doubt it personally, they will focus their efforts as they seem to have been on the multi-display, media, gaming rich end of the market. I don’t follow the whole graphics card war thing to be honest but I would put my money in NVIDIA right now. With cloud computing and gaming coming to us via a pc things like CUDA gpu clustering and this whole program-open aspect to the cards is going to line them up well for both sides of the telephone/optical cable.