AMD to enable ATI Stream for Radeon HD 4000s

tomos · 14 Nov 2008 at 15:58

saw it on anandtech here

GPGPU (General-purpose computing on graphics processing units) initiatives are still in their infancy these days but with so much power lying in wait on graphics cards, both Nvidia and AMD are getting into the scene to promote their own solutions. While Nvidia has its CUDA development tools AMD has Stream and it is the latter which will get some time in the spotlight starting next month when it will be available to Radeon HD 4600 and 4800 series cards.

"ATI Stream is one of the best examples of the power of Fusion, and today's announcement is the first major step in taking this important new technology mainstream," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. "For the millions of people that have already purchased an ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics card, this is one more way we're saying thank you and helping them get more out of their investment."

Set to be enabled through the Catalyst 8.12 driver, which is scheduled for a December 10 release, ATI Stream will see the Stream Processors of Radeon cards be used for more than 'just' games. With Stream, the GPUs will be put to good use in software like the ATI Avivo Video Converter utility and application from ArcSoft and CyberLink and make demanding computing tasks run a lot faster than they do on CPUs. According to AMD, the ATI Stream SDK will be fully OpenCL compliant.

SlyReaper · 14 Nov 2008 at 16:14

I don't get it. So I'll be able to use the stream processors on my 4850 to augment the work of my CPU in a handful of programs I've never heard of, much less use? Why is this exciting news? :confused:

Scougar · 14 Nov 2008 at 16:17

It's a new field of interest, there will likely be more than the apps mentioned in the future. I.e. look at folding at home, no point doing it on the CPU anymore.

tomos · 14 Nov 2008 at 16:27

video encoding would be massively faster. i'm hoping for megui/x264 to support this soon

Devil_Spawn · 14 Nov 2008 at 16:28

hopefully someone will get physx running on this too.

SlyReaper · 14 Nov 2008 at 16:29

Scougar said:
It's a new field of interest, there will likely be more than the apps mentioned in the future. I.e. look at folding at home, no point doing it on the CPU anymore.

I don't fold on my CPU anyway. GPU client all the way.

LoadsaMoney · 14 Nov 2008 at 16:52

The Avivo Video Convertor is faster than Nvidia's Badaboom, and its free, where as Badabooms about £20.

LoadsaMoney · 14 Nov 2008 at 17:07

More info.

mrthingyx · 14 Nov 2008 at 17:34

Techreport have an interesting take on Stream...

AMD are looking to release a new tool within CCC which will transcode video as a bundled feature... for free.

http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/15886

Instead of waiting for third parties to take advantage of these updates and create consumer GPGPU apps for Radeon users, AMD will offer one together with the new Catalyst release. As far as we can tell, the new Avivo Video Converter will more or less mirror the functionality of the Elemental Badaboom video transcoder we wrote about recently, but with two key differences: it'll run on AMD GPUs, and it won't cost $30. While AMD hasn't given us a full list of supported input and output formats yet, the firm's presentation mentioned GPGPU-accelerated transcoding of MPEG-2 and 1080p H.264 video for use on handheld players, DVDs, and other devices. In the company's own benchmarks, the encoder cut HD video transcoding times from three hours to just 12 minutes on a system with a 2.6GHz Phenom X4 and a Radeon HD 4850. There's a catch, however—you'll need a Radeon HD 4600- or 4800-series GPU to use the tool.

Strife212 · 14 Nov 2008 at 17:35

SlyReaper said:
I don't fold on my CPU anyway. GPU client all the way.

Thats what he was saying

londonbairn · 14 Nov 2008 at 17:47

Are we going to see an ATi Paintball event now as well?

RizlaKing · 14 Nov 2008 at 18:59

Hey it's free so does it matter if you don't or won't make use of it right now maybe you will in future not like their asking for money.

drunkenmaster · 14 Nov 2008 at 19:26

mrthingyx said:
Techreport have an interesting take on Stream...

AMD are looking to release a new tool within CCC which will transcode video as a bundled feature... for free.

http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/15886

the new avivo video converter? thats been around since, maybe the x1900 series, x1800? or was it the 2900xt. Either way, you can download it today, as you've been able to for a long time, it doesn't need Stream, its always worked its just a title they can say uses Stream which sounds and is good, just something else that works and encourages more people to use it.

HOwever, Cuda, Stream, gpgpu stuff, utterly useless for 99% of home users no matter how much of a power user they think they are.

Folding will be the only use it gets on this forum frankly and the odd bit of photoshop work, same as Cuda.

I did actually laugh when I read folding -"no point doing it on the CPU anymore" ... there was never any point whatsoever

If you're doing it for score, and honestly everyone is, its done smeg all in terms of research and will continue to be a pet project with massive ambition and no results. Anyway if you're doing it for score, why shoot yourself in the foot, use both GPU and CPU on different clients.

The_Abyss · 14 Nov 2008 at 23:21

drunkenmaster said:
HOwever, Cuda, Stream, gpgpu stuff, utterly useless for 99% of home users no matter how much of a power user they think they are.

I spend 4 or 5 hours a day at work in Adobe Premiere, Photoshop and Flash.

Oddly, then I spend another 2 hours or so a night at home on the same propositions. Even packing an overclocked Q9450, this is great news for me and many other users. With a 4870 512 largely sitting otherwise idle, but still drawing too much power, this release is a god send and finally delivers what has been promised for a long while now.

drunkenmaster · 14 Nov 2008 at 23:34

The_Abyss said:
I spend 4 or 5 hours a day at work in Adobe Premiere, Photoshop and Flash.

Oddly, then I spend another 2 hours or so a night at home on the same propositions. Even packing an overclocked Q9450, this is great news for me and many other users. With a 4870 512 largely sitting otherwise idle, but still drawing too much power, this release is a god send and finally delivers what has been promised for a long while now.

yes but truly, you are that 1%, your work will benefit, but hell, I want to believe I'm a power user, I am getting more into and getting closer to using 3dsmax to do some character modelling, maybe some photoshop work for texturing stuff, but seriously 99% of home users won't use their gpu's for anything but games.

its interesting but not to big a deal, its one of the features companies ram down your throats but really shouldn't even be taken into consideration for your average user.

On the ATI vs Nvidia front its good that ATi have their own software platform for their cards as in business it could do well for them, especially as if they can make use of the software using all 800 stream processors it could be insanely fast. For gaming its very hard to push and use all 800 SP's at any one time very often, but lots of other apps that are more predictable than games might be able to use it very effectively.

In terms of raw power it does spank the 280gtx, its just getting the full power out of it is much harder than it is on the 280gtx.

sarge78 · 14 Nov 2008 at 23:57

Pffft, Steam has always been supported on 4xxx hardware. I used 8.9 cats to trial the SDK but Its good to see AMD finaly making some noise and giving it greater support.

drunkenmaster said:
In terms of raw power it does spank the 280gtx, its just getting the full power out of it is much harder than it is on the 280gtx.

Actually the G200 makes a much better GPGPU.
________
Honda SL90

tomos · 15 Nov 2008 at 00:31

in terms of usefulness to the general pc user, couldnt that apply to the first few steps of any new tech? eventually it evolves and adapts to something everyone takes for granted.

Tee Hee Johnson · 15 Nov 2008 at 00:53

The ATI Avivo Video Converter was damn good actually...!

I used it a few times... using all them wee stream processors to encode video really did work!

drunkenmaster · 15 Nov 2008 at 10:03

sarge78 said:
Pffft, Steam has always been supported on 4xxx hardware. I used 8.9 cats to trial the SDK but Its good to see AMD finaly making some noise and giving it greater support.

Actually the G200 makes a much better GPGPU.

I didn't say which makes a better GPGPU actually, I said the ATi card has far more power, which , it does. THe problem is, hell I forget the numbers, at the moment its pretty easy to get the full 240 streams working constantly on the 280gtx, well thats not the problem, the problem is with the ATi cards, at peak absolute efficiency it can use all 800 sp's at the same time, unfortunately, by design it can also use far far less at any given time aswell as low as 160, and because they are roughly what, half the speed, or alittle more than the nvidia cores that can be a fairly low amount of processing power. Now Nvidia won't always be able to load all 240 completely, by sheer design something will always be waiting for data, but staying 80% loaded is fairly easy for it. THe ATI card staying 80% loaded is much much much harder, the right type of software, the ultimate efficient 100% perfectly design program and the ATi card literally would send the 280gtx to sit in a dark corner crying its eyes out.

But neither is the "better" gpgpu really, if your software can be run efficiently on the ATi hardware, the ati card is far better, if it can't be the 280gtx might be better.