NVidia has been pushing its CUDA software-developer kit and C compiler for some time as a way to use the massive parallelism of its graphics processing units (GPUs) to take on tasks currently done by the central processor. Yoking graphics cards together using its SLI technology can provide supercomputer-class processing of tasks that can make use of the parallelism.

This is generally of interest to academics and others who need to crunch a lot of lnumbers for tasks such as visualization. But for the first time a consumer (well, geeky consumer) application has gone on sale.

Badaboom, which costs $29.99 from the nVidia and Elemental Technologies, harnesses nVidia GPUs to "dramatically" reduce the time to convert video formats for use by media players. A trial version will also be available for download.