well today I have what I believe is going to be a fascinating episode for
you guys so let's start with video okay
so videos everybody likes to watch videos there's a few people these days
who own tablets there's a Motorola Zoom or smartphones there's an iPhone 4 and
want to watch video on them but not all these devices and not all the media
players are compatible with every kind of media that you that you download or
rip or whatever however else you get your media so you often have to
transcode or convert the media from one format to another so I'm going to be
using media converter 7 for my testing today this is actually a really cool
little piece of software it was $29.99 with a coupon code that I found very
easily on their website okay so I'm going to be using a 200 Meg it is a 3
minute 1080p file that was actually taken with oh here you guys can actually
see me this camera the sx1 is 1080p I'm
going to be outputting it to an iPad compatible format and I'm going to be
doing it on a number of different platforms a number of different ways so
I have three platforms I'm going to use and I'm going to be using kind of a best
of Intel 1155 so that's the z68 chipset
with a 2600k hyperthreaded processor that is the most expensive platform out
of what I'll be using today I have an AMD am3 platform I have a Crosshair 4
formula with a 6 core 1100t CPU bear in
mind of course that the motherboard doesn't really have any impact on the performance in this case it's a CPU
limited thing and finally I have AMD socket fm1 so this is their new Apu
socket so I've got a 3850 quad core Apu
here on an a75 m55 motherboard I'm going
to be using all the same Hardware across these different boards and platforms so
I'm going to be using 8 gigs of DDR3 memory I've got same power supply and
Intel 510 series SSD on my test platform
then on each platform I'm going to en uh transcode the video a different way so
I'm going to use a CPU then I'm going to use a GTX 580 then I'm going to use a
radon 6970 and finally I'm going to use the
integrated GPU and we're going to compare how all these Solutions perform
against each other whether we're using CPU Cuda direct compute or uh in Intel
1155 case virtue or the Apu on AMD fm1
let's see how it goes okay so my first two runs are done with
the CPU as well as with the GTX 580 using Cuda on the 1155 platform and the
one that I'm about to run and the reason I'm stopping to tell you guys about it
is with Lucid virtue so all I have to do
is turn virtue on there we go the
processor Graphics are now enabled although I am plugged into the dedicated
graphics card so the igp is working now
and I'm going to run it with this one and see how it goes so I'll share
results with you as I go here and as I discover what works better and what
doesn't so here's a bit of an update I have the AMD fm1 system running right
now so I've got most of my results done for that and I'm actually running it
with the 6970 right now so you can see that the GTX 580 due to its very high
performance actually outperforms the CPU by itself which we expect I mean the CPU
was the slowest out of all of our results even on the 1155 platform where
it's a significantly faster CPU with hyperthreading um the igp did beat the
CPU but uh not maybe not by as much as I
would like to see and uh actually here's something interesting I also added on
the 1155 platform I tested a GTX 550 to
see how it would compare to the 580 so it's almost as slow as a CPU so and
definitely slower than the igp so if you're using 1155 and a lower end
graphics card well anything but a super high-end graphics card you might
actually be better off with uh with
virtue or using the CPU versus using
Cuda so uh here we go we've got our result for the
6970 so here it is it is
133 so you can see the 6970 once again
doesn't perform quite as well as the 580 but it's close and then the igp trails
significantly behind those two due to it well being substantially slower so I'm
pretty much much finished my data at this point only to discover that it was
all pretty much for nothing so what I accidentally did was I used a video file
this one which had already been converted from its uh large High bit
rate self into a Windows media audio
file so what I'm going to do Second Time Around is I'll be using this one this is
a 1.64 gig file whereas this is a 200 Meg file by
aent okay so this is a OV file that is
what is natively recorded by my camera
then I'm going to convert this into an iPad format so you can see the data I've
got here with the other file so the uh
Intel Quicks sync is a good performer uh Cuda also performs quite well open CL is
a little bit behind Cuda and then CPU is
uh inv variably uh the slowest solution
however I just ran quicksync on the new
file which is the Intel Core i7 extreme
Edition 990x or maybe it's a 980x unboxing and I it was done in 56 seconds
I am now running it on opencl and you can see the difference in performance
between quicksync and opencl on that already transcoded once file this ran in
yeah 56 seconds and it's already taken well over 2 minutes with open CL when
we're doing a far more complicated file so I'm going to just rerun everything
which is good going to take me look at the time it is now already which is
going to take me another you know hour or hour and a half or whatever and then
I will be back with proper results for you guys okay well I'm finally done took
me another couple hours to uh finish up here but I have the results so I've just
uh used my old chart but all of the
bottom results are the ones using the
larger file and converting it to an iPad compatible format with media converter 7
so let's have a look at the chart here and let's go we'll go through it together so this is the
2600k with the CPU alone it clocks in at
1 minute 40 seconds which is better than the 1100t better than the 3850 and
better than the I 32105 so that makes a lot of sense cuz
this is more expensive than this which is more expensive than this which is
almost the same as this so this one you can see due to its four cores this is
two cores with hyperthreading this is six cores four hyperthreaded cores so
this guy with this four cores performs better than the equivalently priced
Intel CPU with only two cores all right
now let's factor in Cuda so we've got a GTX 580 now so they actually all perform
fairly similarly this was a bit of a glitch but I ran it again and I don't
know why but the 1100t did not perform quite as well with my Cuda GTX 580 as
the uh the other cards did with the 6950
we seem to see a lot more benefit from additional CPU power so you can see that
the 6950 is still an improvement over
the CPU but it doesn't like Cuda was very
similar for with a GTX 580 across the
board whereas the 6970 it seems like if you have a more powerful CPU to feed it
it is really able to ramp up the performance so with the I
32105 it clocked in at 246 with the 3850
226 209 with the 1100t and a whopping 1
minute 36 seconds seconds with the
2600k now igp performance so the
1155 the 2600k and the 2105 were both
within spitting distance of each other and in spite of this being a quad core
CPU that is clocked higher this being a dual core CPU so you can see that the
igp is doing all the work here it's not getting a whole lot of help from the CPU
side like we saw with the 6950 as for the fm1 solution remember
unlike the Intel igp with using Lucid
virtue on the fm1 solution you can only use it if you are running Onboard video
this can be used if you're using a z68 or h67 chipset here's my z68 board this
can be used even if you are running a discret graphics card so that's kind of
a cool feature as well so here you can see that the igp did not perform as well
as the 6970 but was still better than the CPU on its own so hopefully this was
helpful thanks for checking out my video on the uh different platforms and their
video transcoding performance Baron ma here's another quick thing to bear in
mind you guys so you can see here that the with the h67 or z68 chipset the 1155
chips whether it's an i7 or an I3 just smoke everything else but only a few
software applications actually support all of these different Hardware
accelerations so if you're using anything that doesn't in terms of share
CPU perform performance you can see that the fm1 3850 due to its additional cores
blows away the equivalently priced uh
product from Intel and then you have to spend quite a bit more to get better
performance on the Intel side don't forget to subscribe guys