What's your AMD Dual core encoding experience?

[sircharles32]

I'm curious to see what the dual core (either Athlon 64 X2 or Opteron) encoding experiences have been. Would anyone like to share their stats? In particular, I'd like to know 1st and 2nd pass FPS and total encode times (if you would like to report filters used, go for it) for Divx and Xvid codecs (and others if you are so inclined). I'd just like to get a feel for the performance of these chips. Any information you can provide will be helpful.


Thank you.

[Revgen]

Divx and Xvid are not built to benefit from dual core cpu's.

X264, however, is able to take advantage of multiple threads. Performance gain is about 50%-70%.

If you use avisynth you can use TSP's MT filter to speed up encoding time for any avisynth filters that you use while encoding. In one particular instance I was able to increase performance by about 90% when using LimitedSharpen by using SetMTmode(2) in avisynth and while encoding to X264 with multithreading enabled.

I did some benchmarks awhile back and posted them in the MT filter thread. (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=707610#post707610) Unfortunately, they're messy, unorganized, and scattered through different posts. But it should give you some idea of what you'll get.

[Nematocyst]

I recently built an X2 system for someone and wanted to get an idea of the relative encoding performance between it and my Athlon XP system. More detailed results follow, but here's the summary:

2.3 Ghz Barton: 3:25:06
2.0 Ghz X2 : 2:04:53
I tried to make the software as close as possible. And as far as I know, the only difference was that the X2 system was using XviD 1.0.2 while the Athlon XP system used 1.0.3. Other than that, the software and inputs were the same. I discovered the XviD difference mid-encode, and decided it would be close enough for me.

Other than the processors, the Athlon XP system probably had a much better hard drive arrangement for this task. What real effect this had on encoding speed, I can't say. But I suspect not much.

I had task manager up the whole encode on the X2 system, and what surprised me was that both cores got utilized, particularly on the first pass where they averaged 97%. The second pass, only about 70% was utilized (90+ on one, ~60 on the other). But that's still better than I expected-- I had thought only one core would get used. The Athlon XP system had 100% usage the whole time, of course.


X2 system:
------------------------------
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ [Manchester core, 2x512KB L2, 2.0 Ghz--200x10]
NVidia nForce4 SLI
2GB 2-3-2-5 RAM
OS/source/avi dest drive: Mirrored 75 gig WD SATA drives
------------------------------
[11/19/2005 9:23:05 PM] AutoGK 1.60
[11/19/2005 9:23:05 PM] OS: WinXP (5.1.2600).2
...
[11/19/2005 9:25:55 PM] Running compressibility test.
...
[11/19/2005 9:29:35 PM] Duration was: 3 minutes 39 seconds
[11/19/2005 9:29:35 PM] Speed was: 44.54 fps.
[11/19/2005 9:29:35 PM] Compressibility percentage is: 82.76
[11/19/2005 9:29:35 PM] Chosen resolution is: 720x320 ( AR: 2.25 )
[11/19/2005 9:29:35 PM] Predicted comptest value is: 76.88
[11/19/2005 9:29:35 PM] Running first pass.
...
[11/19/2005 10:10:51 PM] Duration was: 41 minutes 16 seconds
[11/19/2005 10:10:51 PM] Speed was: 79.11 fps.
[11/19/2005 10:10:52 PM] Expected quality of first pass size: 79.55
[11/19/2005 10:10:52 PM] Running second pass.
[11/19/2005 11:27:58 PM] Duration was: 1 hour, 17 minutes 6 seconds
[11/19/2005 11:27:58 PM] Speed was: 42.35 fps.
[11/19/2005 11:27:58 PM] Job finished.

Athlon XP system:
------------------------------
AMD Athlon XP Mobile 2600+ [Barton core, 512KB L2, OC @2.3 Ghz--184x12.5]
NVidia nForce2 MCP-T
1GB 2.5-4-4-7 RAM
OS/avi dest drive: 75 gig WD IDE
source drive: 160 gig WD IDE
------------------------------
[11/19/2005 9:02:23 PM] AutoGK 1.60
[11/19/2005 9:02:23 PM] OS: WinXP (5.1.2600).2
...
[11/19/2005 9:04:58 PM] Running compressibility test.
...
[11/19/2005 9:10:59 PM] Duration was: 6 minutes 0 seconds
[11/19/2005 9:10:59 PM] Speed was: 27.14 fps.
[11/19/2005 9:10:59 PM] Compressibility percentage is: 82.76
[11/19/2005 9:10:59 PM] Chosen resolution is: 720x320 ( AR: 2.25 )
[11/19/2005 9:10:59 PM] Predicted comptest value is: 76.88
[11/19/2005 9:10:59 PM] Running first pass.
...
[11/19/2005 10:31:30 PM] Duration was: 1 hour, 20 minutes 30 seconds
[11/19/2005 10:31:30 PM] Speed was: 40.56 fps.
[11/19/2005 10:31:30 PM] Expected quality of first pass size: 79.55
[11/19/2005 10:31:30 PM] Running second pass.
[11/20/2005 12:27:29 AM] Duration was: 1 hour, 55 minutes 58 seconds
[11/20/2005 12:27:29 AM] Speed was: 28.16 fps.
[11/20/2005 12:27:29 AM] Job finished.