Computerworld notes "ATI Stream," which is included in a new driver update for ATI Radeon HD 4000 series-based cards:'To show its potential, ATI released free Avivo Video Converter software, which takes advantage of the Radeon HD 4000's graphics processors to let users convert video as much as 17 times faster at up to 720p quality, said Dave Nalasco, a technical expert at ATI, during a webcast today. The entire archived webcast is available online by clicking on "On Demand" and then "Live Show Wed Dec 10 2008."
Other software that takes advantage of ATI Stream includes Adobe Systems Inc.'s PhotoShop CS4, After Effects CS4, Flash 10 player and Acrobat Reader and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista, PowerPoint 2007, Expression Encoder and Silverlight player. Video-editing applications from CyberLink and ArcSoft are expected by March.'
It's a bit unclear now just what this means for Adobe apps; Premiere is not mentioned and there's been no chatter on compatibility.
ATI does say that the ATI Video Converter "accepts almost any video file format as a source, and outputs to many different file formats, including MPEG-1, MPEG-4/DivX, WMV and H.264/AVC. MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC benefit from ATI Stream acceleration with ATI Radeon HD 4800 and ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series GPUs."
Some of the strategy for countering nVidia is in the PDF ATI Stream Computing Update. nVidia's recent moves were discussed here earlier in CS4 & the nVidia CX movies.
