TMPGEnc Xpress 3
Video compression is one of the best areas for the Pentium 4, if the application is optimised for its architecture. In the 3.0 version, TMPGEnc is optimized especially for Netburst architecture and also includes SSE3 optimizations. The following results comes from the encoding of a 3600 picture DV video in MPEG-2 with a 4000 Kbits /s bitrate, in two paths:
With TMPGEnc, the double channel has a significant influence. So if the processors’ increase in PR due to the improvement in cache size (3400+ -> 3700+, 3800+ -> 4000+) isn’t justified in this test, the PR increase due to the double channel is. Thus the 3200+ S754 is “only” 1.5% faster than its 200 MHz smaller S939 counterpart.
DiVX 5.21 / VirtualDub
The encoding of DiVX via VirtualDubMod is our next test. We used a 1500 picture MPEG-2 file compressed in DiVX 5.11 (with B-Frame and a 1500 Kbits bitrate), with VdubMod in « Fast Recompress » mode.
Performance gains due to the cache and double channel are noticeable but small. Therefore, the P-Rating isn’t really justified for most of the processors. The Athlon 64 3200+ S754 is 7% faster than the 3200+ Socket 939.
