Video Encoding
3DMark and PCMark are great tools for getting a quick peak at to what your system performance should look like. That being said, you still want to run some real world benchmarks to test actual activities people perform on their computers. That’s exactly what we intent on doing. The first up in our suite of real world benchmarks in video encoding. Our tool of choice for this torture is Nero Recode. This video encoder supports many of the different portable formats the average user may use to re-encode their favourite content, and it’s fully multithreaded. This allows it to push any processor to maximum, showing how well it performs in pure processing.
The first movie to be run through our encoding test was the dystopian Sci-Fi romp known as Equilibrium. We chose to re-encode the DVD to iPod Video AVC based on the hunch that many people who have iPods like to put movies on their iPods. As for the title choice, Equilibrium represents a title of average length, a good mix of light and dark (mostly dark) scenes, and hey it’s just good fun.
With our 200MHz overclock, the Phenom 9600 Black Edition posted a performance gain of 6%. Now that’s coming much closer to matching the 8% overclock in percent for percent performance. When we put the processor back to stock clocks, and enabled the TLB erratum fix, we experienced a drop in performance of less than 1%. Now these performance deltas weren’t quite wide enough for my tastes, so I searched through my library for another title to test. Keeping the performance numbers just posted in mind, I looked for a longer movie with a lot more brightly lit scenes. I arrived at a title you may or may not have heard of.
In 1994 a movie came out that launched a franchise. That movie was Stargate, and it’s my second title selected for testing the Phenom 9600 Black Edition in video encoding. As noted above, I selected this movie for its longer….length. I also picked it for it’s brightly lit scenes (it’s shot in a desert), and some of it’s catching details.
This movie took nearly a full ten minutes more to encode in all instances than Equilibrium, and nearly rang in at an hour overall per run. As for performance, we see a 7.3% increase with our 8% overclock. This is even better than the previous title, and much closer to the percent-for-percent target I was hoping for. However with that excellent high comes a brutal low. The TLB erratum fix resulted in nearly a 4% drop in performance, which means this movie took an additional 2 minutes to encode with the fix enabled.
At this point it should be noted that even with all the processing involved in video encoding, and the fact that each movie had been encoded three times for a total of six runs, I had yet to see any data corruption or problems resulting from the TLB erratum. Needless to say a performance hit has been experienced in every benchmark so far due to the TLB erratum fix being enabled. Let’s take a look at some popular game titles now, and see if the same effect is present.
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