ATI Stream goes fisticuffs with NVIDIA's CUDA in epic GPGPU tussle

It's a given that the GPGPU (or General-Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) has a long, long ways to go before it can make a dent in the mainstream market, but given that ATI was talking up Stream nearly three whole years ago, we'd say a battle royale between it and its biggest rival was definitely in order. As such, the benchmarking gurus over at PC Perspective saw fit to pit ATI's Stream and NVIDIA's CUDA technologies against one another in a knock-down-drag-out for the ages, essentially looking to see which system took the most strain away from the CPU during video encoding and which produced more visually appealing results. We won't bother getting into the nitty-gritty (that's what the read link is for), but we will say this: in testing, ATI's contraption managed to relieve the most stress from the CPU, though NVIDIA's alternative seemed to pump out the highest quality materials. In other words, you can't win for losin'.