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That Phoronix FFmpeg test clearly measures 2 - 4 threaded speed only, so Intel's fast quad core CPUs shine there. The test description is "H.264 HD to NTSC DV"
by vaeinae 9y ago
That Phoronix FFmpeg test clearly measures 2 - 4 threaded speed only, so Intel's fast quad core CPUs shine there. The test description is "H.264 HD to NTSC DV" where the main bottleneck is slow H.264 decoding (CABAC decoding is somewhat difficult to parallelize).
You should look for x264 (H.264/AVC encoding) or x265 (H.265/HEVC encoding) tests. HandBrake is often used as a frontend for these, so the test may be named Handbrake H.264 HQ encoding or something like that.
x265 benefits a bit more from Intel's faster AVX instructions, but Ryzen (or Threadripper/Epyc) is still a very valid choice for high quality HEVC encoding. The GPU alternative would be Intel Skylake's GPU-accelerated encoder through Media Server Studio, which has scored well in MSU's test: http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2016/ http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2016/
As for H.264 encoding, there are no GPU encoders that could approach x264 quality.
- paulmd 9y agoPlease also note that there is a new x264 version that supports AVX512 in nightly as of a few weeks ago. It may not have made it down the pipe to everyone's package managers yet but it's out there and should improve performance on Skylake-X and related Xeons.
- icelancer 9y agoGreat post. I can tell you my benchmarks using GPUs and various platforms didn't favor x264 encoding, as you also noted. >x265 (H.265/HEVC encoding) Not something our services can reasonably support or use currently, so even if true, Ryzen/Threadripper is still probably not something we can go with. I look forward to switching in 2-3 years when we re-visit this conversation, or adopting it for other services soon. I'm very excited for AMD's competition and fully willing to switch; I just haven't seen the evidence that supports that it would be a good idea for our particular use case.