10 - GPU performance: Race Driver - GRID | Video transcoding - Bababoom

Gaming: Race Driver - GRID

Codemasters has released Race Driver: GRID, offering many Race events to compete in. Word is: "Charge a Ford Mustang GTR muscle car through the iconic streets of San Francisco, race a BMW 320Si in the Jarama Touring Car Race and drift around the docks of Yokohama in a Nissan Silvia S15. Race against 11 friends on your favorite track and test your mettle online or prove yourself in the single player game." GRID is a stunning game with a great racing feel, but most of all .. excellent graphics.

Based on the Ultra image quality settings you are looking at resolutions from 10x7 up to the mother of all resolutions, the 4M+ pixels counting 2560x1600. To spice image quality up, we enabled 4xMSAA as well.

Image Quality Settings

• Ultra - everything maxed out
• 4x MSAA

Again a win for the 4850, it's real close though. I do not know what exactly is going on at 2560x1600, but my impression is that just looks like a flat out frame buffer limit, which is weird as the 4850 has the same 512MB to work with just as the GTX/GTX+ does.

Once a card runs out of it's framebuffer in AA modes it will need to swap back and forth the frame in memory causing collosal performance decreases.

GPU Computing - Video transcoding - Bababoom

Most of us have an iPhone, iTouch or iPod, right? I don't know about you but whenever I need to catch a flight, train or just traveling in general, I like to have some movies on my iTouch. So the problem at hand: if you like to fill that iPod with video content, your PC could be at work transcoding movies for a day easily. Quite annoying!

Elimental technologies is working right now on several software applications that will manage the transcoding process over the GPU, and it does so with CUDA. Where a PC with a modern processor would take, say five hours to transcode. With the CUDA based Badaboom media converter (badabing? Sopranos? or is that my twisted mind?) you can cut down that time massively, all done with the help of your graphics processor.

As you can see, the GTX+ (with the beta software) can pretty much transcode as fast as a GTX 280. The data you are reading by the way is simply the number of seconds it took to transcode 200 MB MPEG2 file at 1280x720 (720P) towards the iPod iTouch format (640x480 @ 2000K Bitrate).

Very impressive as the fastest software transcoder (that utilized a quad-core Q6600 processor) takes 67 seconds.