Thought it would be interesting to see how the new Mac Pro performs in the area of h.264 encoding. One of the best h.264 encoders happens to be x264, used by many popular tools like HandBrake, VisualHub (rip), FFMPEG and Mencoder. x264 is highly multi-thread optimized and is very accurate in reporting its speed, via FPS values. Due to that, it is an excellent way to benchmark a system using a real-life process like video encoding. There are currently 2 popular "benchmark tools" that handle this, Tech ARP's x264 Benchmark and Tech ARP's x264 Benchmark HD. I used both since I believe SD encoding is still very important to many, not all content is HD. Besides running each using their default builds of x264, I also used the latest build of x264, which is heavily optimized for the Nehalem architecture.
While these tests were done in Windows (via BootCamp), they should translate well to OS X. Part of the reason for not doing these tests in OS X was lack of a similar benchmarking script (although I thought about writing one myself) and part was lack of a recent compiled binary of x264 containing the Nehalem optimizations.
And now, for the results:
In bold are results from the most current (as of 03/15/2009) build of x264. The first 4 of each set are the first pass of the encode, the last 4 are the second pass. First passes are always faster due to being less complicated to compute. The benchmark loops over the same content 4 times to make sure the results are not artificial. As you can see, the numbers are very close between runs, differentiating by no more than 1-2 frames.
While these tests were done in Windows (via BootCamp), they should translate well to OS X. Part of the reason for not doing these tests in OS X was lack of a similar benchmarking script (although I thought about writing one myself) and part was lack of a recent compiled binary of x264 containing the Nehalem optimizations.
And now, for the results:
Code:
SD Benchmark, x264 0.55.663
encoded 1749 frames, 185.63 fps, 1849.61 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 185.95 fps, 1849.61 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 186.26 fps, 1849.61 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 185.33 fps, 1849.61 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 186.26 fps, 1849.61 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 62.54 fps, 1834.86 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 62.53 fps, 1834.85 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 62.60 fps, 1834.90 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 62.61 fps, 1834.96 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 62.29 fps, 1834.90 kb/s
[B]SD Benchmark, x264 0.67.1127
encoded 1749 frames, 216.94 fps, 1841.95 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 219.04 fps, 1841.95 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 216.11 fps, 1841.95 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 219.06 fps, 1841.95 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 217.35 fps, 1841.95 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 84.61 fps, 1820.71 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 84.67 fps, 1820.71 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 84.35 fps, 1820.71 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 84.80 fps, 1820.71 kb/s
encoded 1749 frames, 85.19 fps, 1820.71 kb/s[/B]
HD Benchmark, x264.exe 0.58.747
encoded 1442 frames, 68.97 fps, 3904.94 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 70.02 fps, 3904.94 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 69.13 fps, 3904.94 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 70.24 fps, 3904.94 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 23.43 fps, 3974.08 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 23.29 fps, 3974.08 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 23.11 fps, 3974.08 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 23.04 fps, 3974.08 kb/s
HD Benchmark, x264.exe 0.59.819M
encoded 1442 frames, 75.16 fps, 3895.06 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 74.97 fps, 3894.31 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 76.08 fps, 3894.86 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 75.40 fps, 3895.56 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 26.29 fps, 3981.30 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 26.17 fps, 3981.71 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 26.12 fps, 3981.34 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 26.09 fps, 3981.22 kb/s
[B]HD Benchmark, x264 0.67.1127
encoded 1442 frames, 90.57 fps, 3973.44 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 89.87 fps, 3973.42 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 90.13 fps, 3973.42 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 89.77 fps, 3973.42 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 35.13 fps, 3933.44 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 34.90 fps, 3933.87 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 33.72 fps, 3933.87 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 34.62 fps, 3934.45 kb/s[/B]