AMD's 785G Chipset - Revolutionary or Evolutionary?

Sorenson Squeeze 5.01

We are using Sorenson Squeeze to convert eight AVCHD videos into HD Flash videos for use on websites.

Our Intel platform holds a slight 2% advantage over the AMD systems in an application that typically favors processor core speed.

MainConcept Reference 1.61

One of our favorite video transcoding utilities is MainConcept Reference. We set our profile to iPOD HQ NTSC and then transcode a 651MB 1080P file to a iPOD friendly 34.7MB file.

We will call this one a tie and move on.

Sony Vegas Pro 9.0 x64

We transcode a 370MB 1080AVCHD file using the Mainconcept MPEG-2 1920x1080 60i, 25Mbps setting with 6-channel audio.

The G41/E6300 combination holds a 4% advantage over the 785G/x2 250 setup.

CyberLink MediaShow Espresso

We transcode a 370MB 1080AVCHD file into a HD friendly file suitable for publishing on YouTube. This program features GPU hardware accelerated decoding via ATI Stream or NVIDIA CUDA. The 785G fully supports this function and is enabled in our test routines.

The ability of the 785G to offload transcoding to the GPU allows it to complete our test 29% faster than the G41. We notice an almost 12% improvement over the 780G/790GX or when we disable hardware decoding on the 785G.

Photoshop CS4 x64

To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 x64, we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test macro only with a custom image sized at 4800x3600. The test performs basic photo editing; a few color space conversions, several layer creations, color curve adjustment, 3x image and canvas size adjustments, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.

Another unusual result as Photoshop typically responds to CPU speed and memory bandwidth. The G41 configuration holds a 16% advantage over the 785G setup.

Bibble 5

We utilize Bibble Labs’ Bibble 5 v2 to convert 50 RAW image files into full size JPEG images with the program’s default settings. This program is fully multithreaded and multi-core aware.

The G41 is 9% quicker than the 785G in a program that AMD recommends for testing their processors. We have noticed in off line testing that the program responds well to improvements in cache latencies. In fact, increasing the Northbridge speed on our Athlon II x2 250 from 2GHz to 2.4GHz decreased our conversion time from 47.9 seconds to 45.6 seconds.