The GPU is set to become one of the most utilized components in your computer, and not just for video games. Nvidia and ATI/AMD have been coming up with graphics chip designs that are extremely parallel in nature and even more programmable than ever before so they are more useful for things outside of rendering your favorite 3D games.

The initial GPGPU efforts are being focused on pushing image and video editing performance but AMD’s AVIVO video converter has produced less than stellar results. With the company’s recent efforts to improve performance and results in their ATI Stream transcoding pipeline one would hope for much better results.

AnandTech’s look at the updated software proves there’s much work to be done if you’re going to blindly trust your GPU to do your transcoding, after all most of it will be batch efforts where you won’t bother to look at the results until a later date.