This first test takes a 1080p Blu-ray HD trailer, already in H.264 format, and converts it to the 480x320 resolution of the iPod touch at 780 kbps. The CPU-based Xilisoft Converter took 72 seconds to complete the operation while the GPU-based applications pulled in MUCH better times: 23 seconds for NVIDIA's Badaboom and 12 seconds for ATI's Avivo Converter. While both GPUs performed well, the ATI application is nearly twice as fast as NVIDIA's program and is 6x faster than the CPU-based encoding process. NVIDIA's Badaboom is 3.1x faster than the CPU encode - still very impressive.
For this benchmark I took a portion of the Star Wars Episode III DVD and encoded it to same specifications and bitrates as the previous test. For those that want to duplicate, I used chapters 1-5 of the first DVD title. While the CPU-based encoder took nearly 5.5 minutes, the ATI Avivo application was able to complete the same job in just 51 seconds - that is more than 6.3x faster! Badaboom was also impressive, coming in at 2.2x faster than the CPU software but was nearly 3x slower than ATI's transcoding application.
Finally, our last iPod converter test takes an 800MB 720p MPEG-2 file and converts it to the same settings as the above two tests. The ATI transcoding application is 4.3x faster than our CPU-based test while the NVIDIA Badaboom program gets the job done 2.6x faster than the CPU alone. This is actually the test with the least difference between ATI and NVIDIA applications - the Badaboom app is only 64% slower than the ATI offering.
This last benchmark takes the same Blu-ray 1080p trailer video we used in the first iPod benchmark but converts it to a 2.5 mbps Windows Media Video file. Because the NVIDIA Badaboom application is unable to transcode to anything other than H.264, it had to sit out this particular test. For the CPU-encoding comparison I used the Microsoft Windows Media Encoder x64 app. The results are just as equally impressive - 5.16x faster on the GPU than the CPU.
