Back in 2005 ATI launched R520 card and has showed to the bunch of journalist that it can do stream computing and transcode video content on its Radeon 2000 series GPUs.

For some reason it abandoned that project and have decided to leave it to rest. Nvidia made quite a lot of noise with its GPU accelerate BabaBoom commercial transcoder, and obviously AMD won’t leave them alone in this market. It looks that AMD has its own way of solving the transcore problem.

The new Catalyst 8.12 is also going to improve some gaming performance and is a result of months of hard work and we’ve heard that Radeon 4000 series will benefit the most from this new driver update.

ATI did a good job with RV770 based Radeon HD4870 and 4870 X2 based cards and we’ve heard that they did well with its mainstream 46x0 and entry level 4550 and 4350  cards. The new driver should make them even more attractive and according to AMD, the new driver should transcode video content to a portable device such as PSP or iPhone significantly faster than Nvidia. If they are right, CUDA might be in trouble.

We’ll see about that, but we can tell you that this is quite a bold claim.