AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 4: Desktop Performance

Video Encoding Performance - DiVX/XMpeg 4.5

What was once reserved for "professional" use only has now become a task for many home PCs - media encoding. Today's media encoding requirements are more demanding than ever and are still some of the most intensive procedures you can run on your PC.

We'll start off with a "quick" conversion of a DVD rip (more specifically, Chapter 40 from the Star Wars Episode I DVD) to a DiVX MPEG-4 file. We used the latest DiVX codec (5.03) in conjunction with Xmpeg 4.5 to perform the encoding at 720 x 480.

We set the encoding speed to Fastest, disabled audio processing and left all of the remaining settings on their defaults. We recorded the last frame rate given during the encoding process as the progress bar hit 100%

MPEG-4 Video Encoding Performance MPEG-2 to DivX Conversion using XMpeg 4.5 & DivX 5.0.3 (Frames per Second - Higher is Better) Intel Pentium 4 3.0C AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.167GHz - Barton) AMD Opteron 244 (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) 103.4 70.5 69.5 60.9 60.0 | 0 | 21 | 41 | 62 | 83 | 103 | 124

Media encoding has always been a strength of the Pentium 4 architecture and despite the improvements to the Opteron, the fundamental architecture is still very K7-like. The end result is that although performance improves a bit under our DivX encoding test, the Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading enabled is still well beyond reach for AMD.