Although the SpursEngine has been met by a lot of skepticism, it has now finally been put through its paces and it turns out that even in a really fast system, it makes a huge difference in terms of CPU usage when it comes to processing video.

Japanese Website, Impress, has run a range of different video encoding tests on the Leadtek PxVC1100 card, and in many scenarios the SpursEngine is creaming a quad-core QX9770 CPU. However, it doesn't always process more frames per second than the CPU, although since the SpursEngine offloads the CPU, you could potentially be doing other things at the same time as you're processing the video.

In some scenarios the SpursEngine is over four times as fast, such as converting an AVCHD stream to H.264 HD, while when it comes to SD quality video, you might actually end up with slightly better performance using the CPU.

The biggest problem is still the price of these cards, and you'll have to be a pretty serious home movie buff to want to fork out for something like this. However, it might become a popular choice with companies who process a lot of HD video, but with fairly limited software support to date, this would need to improve first.

You can find the benchmark figures here