What's the Best Platform for Transcoding Media? Find Out NOW!! Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,788 words · ~8 min read
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well today I have what I believe is going to be a fascinating episode for
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you guys so let's start with video okay
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so videos everybody likes to watch videos there's a few people these days
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who own tablets there's a Motorola Zoom or smartphones there's an iPhone 4 and
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want to watch video on them but not all these devices and not all the media
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players are compatible with every kind of media that you that you download or
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rip or whatever however else you get your media so you often have to
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transcode or convert the media from one format to another so I'm going to be
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using media converter 7 for my testing today this is actually a really cool
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little piece of software it was $29.99 with a coupon code that I found very
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easily on their website okay so I'm going to be using a 200 Meg it is a 3
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minute 1080p file that was actually taken with oh here you guys can actually
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see me this camera the sx1 is 1080p I'm
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going to be outputting it to an iPad compatible format and I'm going to be
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doing it on a number of different platforms a number of different ways so
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I have three platforms I'm going to use and I'm going to be using kind of a best
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of Intel 1155 so that's the z68 chipset
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with a 2600k hyperthreaded processor that is the most expensive platform out
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of what I'll be using today I have an AMD am3 platform I have a Crosshair 4
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formula with a 6 core 1100t CPU bear in
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mind of course that the motherboard doesn't really have any impact on the performance in this case it's a CPU
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limited thing and finally I have AMD socket fm1 so this is their new Apu
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socket so I've got a 3850 quad core Apu
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here on an a75 m55 motherboard I'm going
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to be using all the same Hardware across these different boards and platforms so
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I'm going to be using 8 gigs of DDR3 memory I've got same power supply and
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Intel 510 series SSD on my test platform
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then on each platform I'm going to en uh transcode the video a different way so
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I'm going to use a CPU then I'm going to use a GTX 580 then I'm going to use a
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radon 6970 and finally I'm going to use the
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integrated GPU and we're going to compare how all these Solutions perform
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against each other whether we're using CPU Cuda direct compute or uh in Intel
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1155 case virtue or the Apu on AMD fm1
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let's see how it goes okay so my first two runs are done with
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the CPU as well as with the GTX 580 using Cuda on the 1155 platform and the
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one that I'm about to run and the reason I'm stopping to tell you guys about it
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is with Lucid virtue so all I have to do
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is turn virtue on there we go the
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processor Graphics are now enabled although I am plugged into the dedicated
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graphics card so the igp is working now
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and I'm going to run it with this one and see how it goes so I'll share
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results with you as I go here and as I discover what works better and what
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doesn't so here's a bit of an update I have the AMD fm1 system running right
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now so I've got most of my results done for that and I'm actually running it
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with the 6970 right now so you can see that the GTX 580 due to its very high
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performance actually outperforms the CPU by itself which we expect I mean the CPU
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was the slowest out of all of our results even on the 1155 platform where
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it's a significantly faster CPU with hyperthreading um the igp did beat the
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CPU but uh not maybe not by as much as I
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would like to see and uh actually here's something interesting I also added on
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the 1155 platform I tested a GTX 550 to
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see how it would compare to the 580 so it's almost as slow as a CPU so and
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definitely slower than the igp so if you're using 1155 and a lower end
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graphics card well anything but a super high-end graphics card you might
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actually be better off with uh with
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virtue or using the CPU versus using
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Cuda so uh here we go we've got our result for the
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6970 so here it is it is
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133 so you can see the 6970 once again
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doesn't perform quite as well as the 580 but it's close and then the igp trails
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significantly behind those two due to it well being substantially slower so I'm
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pretty much much finished my data at this point only to discover that it was
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all pretty much for nothing so what I accidentally did was I used a video file
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this one which had already been converted from its uh large High bit
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rate self into a Windows media audio
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file so what I'm going to do Second Time Around is I'll be using this one this is
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a 1.64 gig file whereas this is a 200 Meg file by
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aent okay so this is a OV file that is
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what is natively recorded by my camera
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then I'm going to convert this into an iPad format so you can see the data I've
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got here with the other file so the uh
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Intel Quicks sync is a good performer uh Cuda also performs quite well open CL is
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a little bit behind Cuda and then CPU is
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uh inv variably uh the slowest solution
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however I just ran quicksync on the new
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file which is the Intel Core i7 extreme
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Edition 990x or maybe it's a 980x unboxing and I it was done in 56 seconds
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I am now running it on opencl and you can see the difference in performance
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between quicksync and opencl on that already transcoded once file this ran in
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yeah 56 seconds and it's already taken well over 2 minutes with open CL when
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we're doing a far more complicated file so I'm going to just rerun everything
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which is good going to take me look at the time it is now already which is
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going to take me another you know hour or hour and a half or whatever and then
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I will be back with proper results for you guys okay well I'm finally done took
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me another couple hours to uh finish up here but I have the results so I've just
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uh used my old chart but all of the
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bottom results are the ones using the
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larger file and converting it to an iPad compatible format with media converter 7
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so let's have a look at the chart here and let's go we'll go through it together so this is the
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2600k with the CPU alone it clocks in at
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1 minute 40 seconds which is better than the 1100t better than the 3850 and
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better than the I 32105 so that makes a lot of sense cuz
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this is more expensive than this which is more expensive than this which is
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almost the same as this so this one you can see due to its four cores this is
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two cores with hyperthreading this is six cores four hyperthreaded cores so
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this guy with this four cores performs better than the equivalently priced
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Intel CPU with only two cores all right
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now let's factor in Cuda so we've got a GTX 580 now so they actually all perform
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fairly similarly this was a bit of a glitch but I ran it again and I don't
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know why but the 1100t did not perform quite as well with my Cuda GTX 580 as
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the uh the other cards did with the 6950
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we seem to see a lot more benefit from additional CPU power so you can see that
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the 6950 is still an improvement over
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the CPU but it doesn't like Cuda was very
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similar for with a GTX 580 across the
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board whereas the 6970 it seems like if you have a more powerful CPU to feed it
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it is really able to ramp up the performance so with the I
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32105 it clocked in at 246 with the 3850
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226 209 with the 1100t and a whopping 1
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minute 36 seconds seconds with the
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2600k now igp performance so the
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1155 the 2600k and the 2105 were both
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within spitting distance of each other and in spite of this being a quad core
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CPU that is clocked higher this being a dual core CPU so you can see that the
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igp is doing all the work here it's not getting a whole lot of help from the CPU
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side like we saw with the 6950 as for the fm1 solution remember
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unlike the Intel igp with using Lucid
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virtue on the fm1 solution you can only use it if you are running Onboard video
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this can be used if you're using a z68 or h67 chipset here's my z68 board this
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can be used even if you are running a discret graphics card so that's kind of
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a cool feature as well so here you can see that the igp did not perform as well
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as the 6970 but was still better than the CPU on its own so hopefully this was
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helpful thanks for checking out my video on the uh different platforms and their
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video transcoding performance Baron ma here's another quick thing to bear in
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mind you guys so you can see here that the with the h67 or z68 chipset the 1155
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chips whether it's an i7 or an I3 just smoke everything else but only a few
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software applications actually support all of these different Hardware
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accelerations so if you're using anything that doesn't in terms of share
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CPU perform performance you can see that the fm1 3850 due to its additional cores
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blows away the equivalently priced uh
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product from Intel and then you have to spend quite a bit more to get better
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performance on the Intel side don't forget to subscribe guys