Over the summer, I had a chance to try the Badaboom Media Converter beta. Badaboom leads a new generation of video encoders that exploit a computer's 3-D graphics chip to speed up performance (in this case, approximately tenfold). It accomplishes this through use of nVidia's CUDA API, which allows particular types of routines to run on the graphics processing unit (GPU) instead of the central processing unit (CPU). Since GPU architectures are massively parallel, and so are video encoding algorithms, it makes perfect sense to do this.