Multimedia Encoding
The VirtualDub software uses the DivX 6.7 software to encoding a movie for us here and again the praises of quad-core processors have to be sung. With a 46% lead in performance over both the top Intel and AMD dual-core processors, the QX9650 takes a commanding lead. As for the 45nm improvements over the 65nm quad-core part, the gap here is noticeable at 6% but we did expect a bit more from it.
The Handbrake software takes a DVD (copied to the hard drive of course) and rips it to a smaller DivX format for saving elsewhere. Since we are measuring frames rendered per second here, the higher scores are better, and the QX9650 finds itself at the top of the list once again. The gain over the QX6850 is again at 6% or so, while the dual-core processors find themselves a full 130% slower!
We close out the media encoding with a look at Lame MT and we find the gaps between the processors to be somewhat compressed. The Lame 3.97a software can only really utilize 2 threads with much efficiency so moving to quad-core processors doesn’t help as much directly here. Looking at the single thread performance levels, the QX9650 gets an edge of about 5% thanks to its larger cache and the same improvements carry over to multi-threaded testing.
