GPU Transcoding Throwdown: Elemental's Badaboom vs. AMD's Avivo Video Converter

Final Words

We're happy to see AMD including ATI Stream in their latest driver release. It's great that both NVIDIA and AMD are doing what they can to advance GPU computing right now. We still won't see any truly major strides made in consumer level applications until we have OpenCL and DirectX 11 to bring hardware agnostic general purpose data parallel programming to the masses, but getting tools (even proprietary ones) out there and in the hands of developers will definitely help.

We feel similarly about the marketability of ATI Stream as we do about CUDA. GPU computing is still only a niche and there aren't enough applications out there that really bring the kind of value to the consumer that we want and expect. The decision about which graphics card you are going to pick up shouldn't come down to ATI Stream and CUDA unless you are really into one of the applications out there that runs on one or both of these technologies. For the average gamer, we definitely recommend making your purchasing decisions on how hardware performs in the games you want to play.

All that said, we are very disappointed with AMD's Avivo video converter as a vehicle to show off ATI Stream. It is a poor application that provides little to no value in exchange for the immense frustration end users will have when trying to transcode video. It is not worth the time to it takes to download or the space it takes up on your hard drive.

In the course of evaluating Avivo, our second look at Badaboom showed us a much better product than we previewed that adequately fills a niche and provides good support for getting video on to an iPod or iPhone quickly.

Badaboom 1.1 shows Elemental's commitment to the cause.  Normally when I'm promised that things will get better, and that features will be added, they don't.  Or if they do, they take a long time.  It is now less than four months since we first previewed Badaboom and with version 1.1, much of what we asked for has been included.  There's still a long way to go and Elemental still has the difficult tasks of matching the quality of established codecs like x264 and MainConcept, but these past two revisions of Badaboom prove one thing: Elemental is serious and willing to listen to feedback.

No matter how you slice it though, Elemental has a much better product than AMD is offering with the Avivo video converter.

The 8.12 drivers in general do offer some fixes for problems we've had since October. Many of our readers noticed the string of somewhat negative jabs we took at Catalyst over the past few months. We'll spare everyone a redux, but just because this driver is more stable, feature complete, and includes some important outstanding hotfixes doesn't mean the problems AMD has with their approach to driver development have been solved. The train wreck that has been the last few months of Catalyst has happened before and it will happen again as long as AMD puts too many resources into pushing drivers out every month and not enough into making sure those drivers are of high enough quality.