Performance - Video Transcoding

Multi-threaded Video Transcoding

x.264 is a free library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams. Encoding/transcoding to that format is one of the most intensive tasks a processor can perform and needs to access system memory to do so.

We encode a h.264 Dolby Digital 1080P trailer of 150 MB to Matroska x.264 with 5.1 channels AC3. This software is a perfect benchmark for CPU and memory testing as it is very sensitive to multiple cores and memory frequency. 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.

Now for dual channel results we ditched the Z77 platform and simply reseat the DIMMs on X79 enforcing dual-channel mode at 2133, the of the results are the Corsair DIMMs setup in Quad Channel model ranging from 1333 to 2133 MHz. The differences certainly aren't big, but they are measurable alright.

Transcoding with MediaShow Espresso

MediaShow Espresso then. 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.

Here the numbers are normalized a little to scale, from 1333 MHz up-to 2133 MHz the number of seconds needed to finish the transcoding job simply sat at 31 seconds. The same memory at 2133 MHz but now in dual-channel mode was 2 seconds slower.

Again in all real-world tests the memory all has been tested on the X79/3960X  yet on the motherboard we rearranged the DIMM modules enforce both Dual Channel mode and quad channel mode.