Microsoft Patents GPU-Accelerated Video Encoding

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has just received a patent that grants the company the rights to GPU-accelerated video encoding, which may be the primary technology that takes advantage of the horsepower of the GPU in today's consumer applications. The broad patent covers tasks to perform motion estimation in videos, the use of the depth buffer of the GPU, to determine comprising, collocating video frames, mapping pixels to texels, frame processing using the GPU, and output of data to the CPU."

Re:2004

[Ant P.]

I was using a GPU to encode video (to S-Video format) using a GPU long before that.

Re:Extra Extra!

[ultranova]

As an aside, what does Microsoft think an MPEG decoder card does?

It doesn't ENCODE, that's for sure.

Just cross-connect the wires and run it backwards.