Performance Mandel FPU | Video encoding

Mandel FPU test

The Mandel FPU benchmark measures double precision (also known as 64-bit) floating-point performance through the computation of several frames of the popular "Mandelbrot" fractal. The code behind this benchmark method is written in Assembly, and it is extremely optimized for every popular AMD and Intel processor core variant by utilizing the appropriate x86 or SSE2 instruction set extension.

Now if you come from the Commodore 64 / Amiga era like me (Peek & Poke Commands FTW dude!), you can probably remember rendering Mandelbrot graphics, a mathematical formula that much like a paradox, never ends and thus is repetitive. Back in the 1990s it took me a full day to complete one Mandelbrot image. Amazing where we are right now as the same set of calculations can be done in a split second & even real-time.

The FPU Mandel test again is HyperThreaded, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core aware. Again 100% baseline performance, good performance.

Multi-threaded Video Transcoding H.264 (DD5.1) to x.264 AC3 5.1

Movie encoding x.264 - x.264 is a free library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams. Encoding/transcoding to that format is one of the most intensive tasks a processor can perform. As such this is probably the best test in the entire review. We encode a h.264 Dolby Digital 1080P trailer of 150 MB to Matroska x.264 with 5.1 channels AC3. It's compressed in such a way you can play it back with Haali media splitter and/or FFDSHOW codecs. We use Handbrake software which is multi-core aware... the more processor cores it sees, the faster it can and will transcode. This software is also a perfect benchmark for CPU and memory testing.

The displayed number is the number of frames rendered per second averaged out over the encoding process. The higher the number, the faster the performance is.

Transcoding with MediaShow Espresso

We recently added another benchmark to the test-suite. It's MediaShow Espresso. The fun thing about this video transcoder is that it can utilize the GPU to assist it with the transcending process.  However, you can also solely use the CPU, making this a very interesting benchmark and you can check out behavior of CPU transcoding AND GPU transcoding all in one test.

Above you can find the results of this new test. In this test we transcode a 200 MB AVCHD 1920x1080i media file to a 1280x720P MP4 binary (YouTube format). This measurement is in seconds needed for the process, thus lower = better.