The guys from Anandtech had a quick look at ATI's Stream, and the end result is anything but good. ATI's AVIVO Video Converter is a free application and for that AMD received a lot of praise, but unfortunately ATI apparently rushed it to market and it just doesn't work properly.

To make things worse, ATI's Stream fails to live up to expectations even when using a third party application like Cyberlink's Espresso, which is the one that even AMD recommends. The biggest issue with ATI's Stream are visible artifacts.

In order to give credit to Cyberlink, Anandtech tried the same video with both the CPU and Nvidia's graphics card and the result speaks for itself. Nvidia certainly leads in this transcoding game, and AMD has a lot of work on its hands if it wants to challenge Nvidia. "The way it's meant to be transcoded" could be Nvidia's next marketing slogan.

ATI's AVIVO Video Converter does bring support for 1080p and 720p H.264 and MPEG-2 output, but that same support becomes meaningless as the end result is just plain poor. To quote Anandtech site :"AVIVO Video Converter, while free, isn't worth the time it takes to download.". Cyberlink's Mediashow Espresso on the other hand lives up to expectations and works fine with Nvidia and even with the CPU.

You can check out the full article here.