Can a newer cpu really help encode faster?

[junglemike]

Hi.
My system is pretty outdated. I have:
Pentium D 915 2x2800mhz socket 775
1.5Gb Ram, Win XP pro.
I mostly encoding videos off my camcoder whch are 720x400@25 fps. I use some deinterlacing and light noise reduction. I encode with x264 using HQ or sometimes balanced profile.
Speed is between 1.5 and 2 fps.
My question is: Will newer cpu significantly improve encoding speed?
I don't want the hassle with replacing cpu for some 10-20% increase in speed.
Does any one know how new core2duo compared with Pentium D (which also has 2 cores) when it comes to encoding video?

[Adub]

Holy sweet mary and joseph. Are you in for a surprise. Not only will a new CPU increase your encoding speed, but it will do it by several multipliers, if not more. However, when you say "new" CPU, are you talking i7 or just Core 2?

[Blue_MiSfit]

LOL!!

A Core 2 Duo is _HUGELY_ faster than a Pentium D, a Core 2 Quad twice as fast as that, and a Core i7 roughly 40% faster than that!!!

CPU speed is almost always the bottleneck when it comes to encoding video!

You'll be absolutely blown away.

You'll likely have to get a new motherboard to support a Core 2 Duo, but they're pretty cheap.. My suggestion for a cheap improvement would be to get a P43 chipset motherboard, 4GB of RAM, and a cheap Core 2 Quad.

~MiSfit

[smok3]

yes, actually if you are a pro, then the difference it can make is between being able to do something or not (the cpu speed).

With never machines i can for example drop the entire footage directly to x264 and have an intranet preview for the colaborators faster than in real-time (including avs downsizeing, TC burnin, ect)....

[junglemike]

Thanks for the feedback.
Currntly I'm checking what kinks of cpu's my mobo supports.
I didn't plan to update the whole computer, just though about updating cpu. I don't play games and except for very slow encoding speed it satisfies me.
I've checked the prices in my area, Quad core are very expensive here (for me at least)
Among the cheap ones :
Core 2 duo E4600, E2180 and others in that price range?
Are they worth it?
For example: E2180 runs at 2000mhz, while my old D 915 runs at 2800mhz. E2180 has only 1mb of cashe, my old has 2mb.
So will it still be faster??
I heared that earlier pentium 4's have very long pipline, and that's why their "mhz" is much slower than "mhz" of newer and even older cpus.
For example I had Pentium 3-800mhz, and later I had P-4 -1700mhz, which had *almost* same performance as p3-800, (maybe some 10-15% more max)

[junglemike]

Another question to follow:
Let's say I decide to buy one of the heap quad core , Q6600 for example,
How does x264 encoding scale up with increase in number of cores?
Will it be able to use effectively all 4 cores?

I'm asking because even right now my p-D 915 only outputing 80-85% of cpu usage (combine for both cores) - it probably cannot effectively utilize 2 cores .
What do you say about this?

[Blue_MiSfit]

You hit the nail on the head :)

The Core architecture is completely different, and extracts massively more performance per clock than Netburst (P4) ever could. The smaller cache will not impact performance hugely. I'd pretty confidently say you'll see a 2-3x improvement over your Pentium D, at stock speeds!

A really excellent option is to get an E2180 (called a Pentium Dual Core, but it's a Core 2 Duo with less cache) and overclock it. They run very cool by default, and most folks get them to over 3GHz on the stock cooler with just a few really simple BIOS tweaks.

If DDR2 ram is cheap in your area like it is here in the 'States ($30-40 for a 4GB kit), I'd really suggest bumping that up as well. 1.5 is probably fine for encoding SD, but having extra RAM never hurt!

As far as the Q6600 goes, x264 can very comfortably scale to 4 cores, and even more! I do it every night :) If you're seeing less than 100% usage on your Pentium D, that probably means AviSynth is bottlenecking you. What do your scripts look like? You might need to multithread some functions.

Even if you don't touch your settings, you will still encode much faster with a Core 2 processor. But, you should tweak things, to extract the maximum performance :)

Also, what are your full system specs. Motherboard model and power supply are important here!

~MiSfit

[Dark Shikari]

Last I recall, with assembly off, a Core 2 decodes H.264 about 2.5x faster per-clock-per-core than a Pentium 4.

I think it's more in x264.

[junglemike]

Ok, You definitely convinced me for cpu upgrade.

As for an overclocking - I don't think my mobo supports it. I'm at work now but from what i rmember it has p900m chipset.
I once was very active overclocker. I o'ced Celerons 266 to 400mhz and celeron 300A to 450 mhz. But I used it with combination of covering the slot1 pins and setting higher cpu voltage :)
But those days are over - I don't think i can mess up with pins with new socket cpus. And i don't have any settings in bios.

Aside from that - Overclocking would require more power. I'm using old 220 watt psu (it's not even supposed to power Pentium-D).
I knew i have to buy more powerful cpu, but I decided to leave the old one. I also have 5 hdd's. All this draws huge amount of power, As a result when starting the encoding in x264 - my system would shutdown some 20miunutes later w/o any warnings. Psu just couldn't handle it :). Right now I connected second psu (really old one) from 80486 - it separately powers all 5 hdd's and dvd-r. So my system is stable for now. But with core2 duo I will probably have to find some solution for power......

My scripts aver very simple: first i deinterlace, than resize (lanczosresize) and than i apply denoising filter when needed (convolution3D)

[junglemike]

Follow up question on PSU issue:
I have lots of (10 at least) psu's from old Pentium 2 and 3 computers. They are in range of 200-240 watt. Some are AT and some ATX.
As I wrote before I already connected AT psu to power all hard disks.
Can I connect 3rd psu to power that 4-pin connector that goes to the motherboard?
I'm sure you know what' i'm talking about. There's a long ATX connector on the mobo and there's another one 4-pin connector that supplies 12v (not sure what for , probably cpu?)
Is it a good idea to move it to another 3rd psu? Is there big consumption on this 12v line?
I'd prefer combine my existing old psu's to solve the power problem and not buy new one. :)

[Blue_MiSfit]

LOL I love your PSU setup :)

I think you should drop a few bills on a quality PSU! I think the Core 2 Duo will draw a lot less juice than a Pentium D, but still..

So you have a 9 series chipset. Man...

I can't see E2180s for sale in the US anymore. The slowest is the E5200 Wolfdale, which is 2.5GHz and has a 45nm Penryn core (which is probably not compatible with your board).

What's the exact motherboard model of your system?

Also, what deinterlacer do you usually use? If you're using something from the convolution3d era, there's probably much faster / better alternatives by now :)

~misfit

[Blue_MiSfit]

I've never hooked up multiple PSUs to a single PC before.

I'd be leery of it!

~MiSfit

[turbojet]

While the Q6600 is a decent choice I'd also suggest looking into Phenom II 940 which is roughly same price as Q6600 for cpu, ram, mobo in USA.
Here is some stock speed x264 benchmarks (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3551&p=10)

People claim Q6600 is 1-5% faster than the 940 at same clock but if you aren't overclocking 940 is a clear winner when it comes to x264 encoding.
If you are overclock 940 typically hits 3.8-4.0 ghz while the Q6600 typical 3.2-3.6 ghz so the 940 has the edge there too.

If you consider upgrades every few years you may want to know that socket 775 that Core 2 cpu's uses is almost at the end of life with intel moving on to socket 1366, but Intel does have a wider selection of motherboards then AMD does for sure. With Phenom II for a few dollars more you can buy an AM3 supported motherboard that's AMD's recent socket that's supposed to go into 2011 and possibly into 2012.

[Blue_MiSfit]

That's a very good point I neglected to mention.

Until recently, Phenom / Phenom II looked like a dead end to me, but the value proposition of the 940 is excellent - combined with the fact that AM2+ will be around for a long time, and we've got a clear winner!

Buying into a socket 775 board right now feels like buying into a socket 939 board back when AM2 was just coming out :P

Still, I think the OP is trying to just shoehorn in a few more components, not do a platform switch :)

~MiSfit

[junglemike]

I think you should drop a few bills on a quality PSU! I think the Core 2 Duo will draw a lot less juice than a Pentium D, but still..
If it will use less juice than i'll probably be OK :-) I can always blame myself later when i burn the whole pc b/c of these old pus's.

So you have a 9 series chipset. Man...
This probably means that i'm in a deep hole right? Is my situation so desperate?

I can't see E2180s for sale in the US anymore. The slowest is the E5200 Wolfdale, which is 2.5GHz and has a 45nm Penryn core (which is probably not compatible with your board).

There are E2180's here in Israel for sale. I was hoping that bios update would solve those compatibility problems.
What's the exact motherboard model of your system?
I don't remember right now since i'm at work. I'll have this infor when I get home.

Also, what deinterlacer do you usually use?
I'm using TomsMoComp
If you're using something from the convolution3d era, there's probably much faster / better alternatives by now
Could you point me to something specific to play with?
It's true that I've used convolution3d for years already. If there's something faster and better - I'm ready to try.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Could you point me to something specific to play with?
It's true that I've used convolution3d for years already. If there's something faster and better - I'm ready to try.


Oh yes!!!

Do you have a half-decent video card? If so, fft3dgpu will become your best friend.


I'm using TomsMoComp

Try YADIF :)


I don't remember right now since i'm at work. I'll have this infor when I get home.

Indeed. Let's look it up, because it may not be compatible :(


This probably means that i'm in a deep hole right? Is my situation so desperate?

Not necessarily ;) worst case you have to spend an extra $75 or so on a half decent P43 motherboard!

~MiSfit

[junglemike]

Do you have a half-decent video card? If so, fft3dgpu will become your best friend
That's interesting idea. does the name imply that it uses graphic processor to do the filtering instead of cpu?
Didn't know one can do that. Can I make a gpu to *participate* into encoding to x264 in a similair way? In other words, can x264 utilize gpu?
Regaring half-decent video card - I have Ge-Force 7300, That's proably qarter-decent, or even 1/8 decent one :)
Try YADIF -I 'll look into it.

[Blue_MiSfit]

fft3dgpu does exactly that :) It uses your Pixel Shader 2.0 compliant GPU to essentially run fft3dfilter. Given a reasonable card, it's usually quite fast.

A 7300gt is definitely slow for the task. The program was developed on a 7800gt IIRC, so a 7300 would probably be very slow.

The way to test would be to try a full encode using fft3dgpu, and then try the same full encode using fft3dfilter (the original, pure software version of this filter). I think your GPU is probably too slow to make much of an improvement.

If you're willing to toss in something a bit better, a Radeon 4670 (~$70 here in the 'states) would rip through fft3dgpu with no problems. In fact, almost any modern GPU will have no problems with SD content. Your 7300gt is about 4 years old, getting long in the tooth :p

As far as GPU accelerated video encoding, there's no many options. There are indeed H.264 encoders that run (quickly) on the GPU, but there are a few problems.

1) They require CUDA, which means at least a GeForce 9 series (and some 8 series) card.
2) They look like CRAP
3) x264 usually looks better when tuned for equivalent speed ;)

So, in the end, it's always better to just use x264 :p
~MiSfit

[swaaye]

I have a Radeon 3850 and a 4670 and have used them for FFT3DGPU. They are very fast with it. The 4670 is slightly slower due to its reduced memory bandwidth (about 60% of a 3850) but that is only a problem if you have a very fast quad core and are working with simple scripts for SD content that pull >40 fps. Both cards also work very well with 720p resolution (as long as they have at least 512MB RAM).

It's too bad that fft3dgpu isn't being developed further though as it definitely could use more of fft3dfilter's features and quality. Especially higher levels of temporal processing (bt=4,5). fft3dgpu's bt=4 doesn't work correctly...

[BloodyBandage]

The extra speed is nice but if your on a budget it shouldn't be the determining factor. When you upgrade you should look at multiple performance metrics.