Its a given that the GPGPU (or General-Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) has a long, long ways to go before it can make a dent in the mainstream market, but given that ATI was talking up Stream nearly three whole years ago, wed say a battle royale between it and its biggest rival was definitely in order. As such, the benchmarking gurus over at PC Perspective saw fit to pit ATIs Stream and NVIDIAs CUDA technologies against one another in a knock-down-drag-out for the ages, essentially looking to see which system took the most strain away from the CPU during video encoding and which produced more visually appealing results. We wont bother getting into the nitty-gritty (thats what the read link is for), but we will say this: in testing, ATIs contraption managed to relieve the most stress from the CPU, though NVIDIAs alternative seemed to pump out the highest quality materials. In other words, you cant win for losin.
