AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Review - Performance - Video Encoding | Transcoding | Corona Renderer

Video Transcoding

Video transcoding is well suited for systems that have more CPU cores. Encoding/transcoding to x.264 format is one of the most intensive tasks a processor can perform. In this test we encode a h.264 DTS 1080P trailer of 150 MB to Matroska x.264 with 5.1 channels AC3. We use the Handbrake software suite heavily threaded, the more processor cores it sees, the faster it can and will transcode. This software is perfect for benchmarking the CPU and memory.

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Compute wise this title also allows you to test features like AVX and OpenCL. We are testing brute processor performance right now though. The displayed number is the number of frames rendered per second averaged out over the encoding process. The higher the number, the faster the performance is. It's exactly in applications like these where processors with more cores really shine as they are all utilized to the maximum.

Ryzen 7 benefits from the higher core clock frequencies and its number of cores. Intel's counterpart however benefits from quad-channel memory as encoding and transcoding is a very memory situated process.

Transcoding 

The fun thing about this video transcoder is that it can utilize the GPU to assist it with the transcoding process. However, you can also solely use the CPU, making this a very interesting benchmark as you can check out behavior of CPU transcoding AND GPU transcoding all in one test.

Above, you can find the results of this new test. In this test we transcode a 200 MB AVCHD 1080P media file as typically recorded on a Full HD video camera to a 1280x720P MP4 binary. This measurement is in seconds needed for the process to finish, thus lower = better. Here you can see that Ryzen suffers from dual-channel memory (a little).

Corona Ray Tracing

This tool is very easy to use, simply save, extract, and run the downloadable file from their site and you will get started and it will automatically give you results at the end that we can then use to compare performance between CPUs.

For Corona I tested at system default memory (dual-channel) and the Noctua cooler. The entry with (LCS/MEM3000) is a little extra TLC run. By using better cooling you can turbo a little higher on the processor cores. Also the memory here is clocked at 3000 MHz. The two combined shave off another 10 seconds. The default score however should be read at 2.25 seconds. 

Workstation grade systems with up to 72 CPU threads can be used in this benchmark, meaning that it was made with heavy threading in mind, making it suitable for testing CPUs with both small and large CPU core counts. We only recently started using this test, results will build up over time. It clearly likes more CPU cores and a bit of threading.