Digital Video Performance

When it comes to multimedia encoding, the benefit of memory bandwidth is enormous. In the WMV-HD to MPEG-2 HD conversion, the first step is dependent on Microsoft’s WMV decoding software. However, in our second test that converts an uncompressed high-definition AVI to a 1920x1080 MPEG-2 file, Canopus algorithms are used throughout the transcoding process. With the OCZ DFI special RAM, the Athlon 3500+ at 2.17GHz outperforms the Athlon64 FX-55 (2.6GHz) with 2-2-2-5 RAM. That’s quite impressive. We did not have time to run the Athlon64 X2 4200+ with OCZ RAM. It’s possible it might beat the Opterons!




The After Effects Benchmark shows that the Opteron platform performs well, but the Athlon64 X2 does a better job for the money. That said, video compositing using the onboard OpenGL hardware provides the best possible performance.



Again, we see that high-bandwidth RAM plays a significant role with video transcoding. In this case, the other impressive detail is that the Athlon64 3500+ comes so close to the Athlon FX-55. Tsunami’s Video Encoder software will take advantage of SSE3 multimedia instructions and this likely accounts for the strong performance of the Athlon 3500+. Once again the X2 4200+ seems to work wonders.