"Millions of users around the world know how time-consuming it is to convert their home videos for use on video sharing sites such as YouTube or for downloading to popular media players such as the iPod," said Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies. "Elemental has developed the BadaBOOM™ Media Converter, a consumer video application scheduled for release in August. By taking advantage of the massively parallel, general-purpose computing architecture of a GeForce GPU, we are able to transcode high-quality video 18 times faster than with CPU-only implementations. This unprecedented performance scaling is the reason why we have made sure that our RapiHDTM Video Platform takes advantage of NVIDIA GPUs."
By recognizing that the value of a GPU transcends gaming, an increasing number of applications are also being written that use the GPU for straight, non-graphical computational tasks. For example, Stanford University’s distributed computing computational program
Folding@Home, combines the computing horsepower of millions of consumer GPUs to simulate protein folding to help find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. With the computing processing power of the GeForce GTX family, applications such as
Folding@Home and others can run upwards of 140 times faster on an NVIDIA general-purpose parallel processor than on some of today’s traditional CPUs.
"GeForce GPUs will soon deliver the biggest boost in processing power we’ve seen in the history of
Folding@Home">
Folding@Home," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry, Stanford University. "The GeForce GTX 280 GPU runs
Folding@Home 45 times faster than the latest 3GHz Core2 Quad CPU. If just one percent of the world’s GeForce 8- and 9-Series GPUs ran
Folding@Home, we would have 70 petaflops of processing power to help find cures for disease. That’s 10 times more processing power than the world’s top 100 supercomputers combined."