Battle of GPU Transcoders: ATI Avivo Converter and NVIDIA Badaboom

In this article, I'll be looking at both applications, Badaboom and the ATI Video Transcoder, to see what advantages each has and comparing performance and quality where applicable. As it turns out, there probably more differences between these two applications than there are similarities making a 1:1 comparison difficult; but heck, we've never let that stop us before!

After spending a few days with both of these applications, I have to say that I impressed overall with what both NVIDIA and ATI have been able to do with GPU-based transcoding. The speed increases seen in both applications are truly astonishing with the obvious win going to AMD's Avivo Video Converter as it was able to beat out Badaboom handily. There is more to be said than raw benchmarks scores though as quality is just as important as speed for video to most people and in that area Badaboom seemed to win out, even when not taking the "garbage" seen in ATI's results into consideration. Some of the quality difference (and thus speed difference) could easily be lent to having non-identical encoding options set in each application. And because neither app gives us full control over what the transcoding engine does we may not be able to get apples-to-apples comparisons until a true third-part application arrives.