GPU video transcoding image quality - NVIDIA CUDA versus AMD Stream

During both our recent review of Cyberlink's MediaShow Espresso, and our wider look at video editing and transcoding applications designed to use NVIDIA's CUDA GPU computing technology, many of the questions we received as a result of said articles were with regard to video output quality, and in particular how the use of CUDA for video transcoding compared in quality terms to AMD's rival Stream functionality (and, indeed, how they both stack up against the more traditional use of the CPU for transcoding).

Although at the time we commented broadly that both AMD and NVIDIA parts seemed to give pretty similar video quality in the examples we used for such comparisons, it soon became clear that a more thorough investigation was required to cover this particular (and of course potentially important) facet of video transcoding in detail.

So it is that we return to Cyberlink's MediaShow Espresso, one of the few applications with support for both Stream and CUDA, to delve into video output quality when using this software with both CPU and GPU-accelerated transcoding in place.