![]() I begged for an early build of both of them and eventually got just that. Several weeks ago AMD dropped a bombshell: x264 and Handbrake would both feature GPU acceleration, largely via OpenCL, in the near future. The list is actually a bit more impressive than what we've published thus far. Now there's always the debate of whether or not the things you do with these applications are actually GPU accelerated, but AMD is at least targeting the right apps with its GPU compute efforts. These are big names that everyone is familiar, that many have actual seat time with. Photoshop CS6, GIMP, Media Converter/Media Espresso and WinZip 16.5 for the most part aren't a list of hardly used applications. In our conclusion to this morning's Trinity review, we wrote that AMD's portfolio of GPU accelerated consumer applications is stronger now than it has ever been before. As a result, Quick Sync remains unused by the applications we want to use for video transcoding. The open source community thus far hasn't been very interested in supporting Intel's proprietary technologies. ![]() What we'd really like to see is support for Quick Sync in x264 or through an application like Handbrake. We use applications like Arcsoft's Media Converter 7.5 and Cyber Link's Media Espresso 6.5 not because we want to, but because they are among the few transcoding applications that support Quick Sync. One of its biggest limitations is the lack of good software support for the standard. Quick Sync's performance didn't move all users to Sandy/Ivy Bridge based video transcoding. While this first implementation of working VCE is better than x86 based transcoding on AMD's APUs, it still needs work: In applications that take advantage of both Quick Sync and VCE, the Intel solution is considerably faster. With Trinity, AMD has an answer to Quick Sync with its integrated VCE, however the performance is hardly as similar as the concept. For a while it seemed as if video transcoding would be the killer application for GPUs, that was until Intel's Quick Sync showed up last year. AMD, and NVIDIA before it, has been trying to convince us of the usefulness of its GPUs for general purpose applications for years now.
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