My Athlon vs. P4 Results + AUDIO OBSERVATIONS

[Jerry Jones]

Wow. I wasn't expecting this after our Pentium 4 1.7gHz computer edged my home Athlon 1.4gHz by about a minute using Terry's test file below.

After I created the .avis on both computers, I converted them to MPEG-2 using VBR at 5500.

Surprise... THE ATHLON WON... this time.

That's right. The 1.4gHz Athlon created the MPEG-2 file in 4:22.
The 1.7gHz Pentium 4 did it in 4:58.

Perhaps the SSE2 isn't as crucial where the MPEG encoding is concerned.

Jerry

P.S. I'll run the test again tomorrow on the P4 box to be certain.

[Jerry Jones]

Same result.

The Athlon 1.4 is faster than the Pentium 1.7 where DV-to-MPEG-2 encoding is concerned.

[Snake-Eyes]

w00t!! If this is consistently true, then I lucked out when I bought/built this system back in May of this year, because that's exactly what I need to do with my video captures.

[paulw]

Not too sure if thisd is of any interest or not..

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1554&p=5

[Jerry Jones]

Yes - thanks for the post.

That confirms my results.

- Jerry

[dZeus]

did anyone try CCE on a P4 vs. Thunderbird/XP shootout?

CCE is a very professional MPEG2 encoder which has been optimized greatly for SIMD instructions, so it would probably give a good indicator of the speedup that SSE2 gives on the P4.

Be sure to try the latest version (2.62 or something like that), since 2.50 hasn't been optimized for SSE2 afaik.

[Sciascia]

I tried it (the mPEGG plugin ver.2.50 for Ulead MSP6.0) and I have tried the ver2.62 demo and did not see a difference (speed or quality) between the two. The biggest improvement between the two versions was the AMD support for the audio part of the encoder. 2.50 just crashes out when you try to encode an MPEG with audio. CCE audio encoders tend to be their weakness anyway (quality-wise), so I use the plugin for video only, then create a PCM wave from the timeline and encode it with TMPGEnc and the toolame audio encoder plugin. Then I use the TMPGEnc MPEG tools to mux the streams. I have not had any A/V sync problems and the quality is great. It is also pretty fast. I am a big fan of CCE, but they make the plugin almost impossible to buy unless you are Japanese, as it is not offered in the states and CCE does not sell it direct. I have contacted them several times about buying it, but they always give me the link to the japanese site and my japanese is a little weak.

I would be interested to see the difference in quality between the new Ligos engine and CCE. I know that Ligos has made some improvements in their engine with the latest version. It woud be nice to see a comparison.