Spurs Engine Video Card - Upscale SD to HD on the fly

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Snowflake

#27592 31-Oct-2008 13:40

Read this in the reseller news magazine and found an online link to the same article elsewhere:
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=105716&pn=3

SpursEngine is capable of encoding or decoding HD video thanks to hardware MPEG2 and H.264 codecs and can upscale standard-definition video to HD on the fly, without tying up the computer's microprocessor.

Thats something more than what the nVidia et al cards do currently correct? Sounds like a good direction for an HTPC video card to me

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Nety

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#174876 31-Oct-2008 14:14

Encoding is a bit new but upscaling is already being done via NVidia's CUDA platform which uses the GPU's processing power. I am sure they could/will do the same for encoding at some point.

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#174877 31-Oct-2008 14:16

It does sound interesting, but also slightly unclear.

The ability to encode (rather than just decode) has me wondering. Does this mean you could link a analog TV tuner card to the hardware encoding capabilities of the Videocard? Does it mean you could use the hardware encoder to convert from one format to another (eg MPEG2 to H.264)? If so, I imagine you would need compliant software that actually supported the hardware in order to make use of it?

Equally, I'm wondering about the upscaling functionality. Scaling is not cpu intensive (compared to encoding/decoding of lossy video formats) and there are already very good scaling technolgies all over the place.

Interesting that it uses cell architecture -I never thought it was a great idea for the PS3 (more like hardware engineers ego's forcing through a concept that would make developers lives hell) but maybe it makes more sense for a video-card?

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