Accelerated Video Encoding: APP Vs. Quick Sync
AMD proudly touts the compute potential of Llano’s 400 Radeon cores. Let’s explore how effective they are compared to Intel’s Quick Sync functionality when it comes to video transcoding:
The A8-3500M is certainly assisted by the general-purpose compute capability of its shader cores, going so far as to beat a similarly-clocked Phenom II X4 and Radeon HD 5570, suggesting that the plumbing of the APU is better-optimized for this task.
Having said that, Quick Sync is a lot faster. And the accelerated A8-3500M results can only match the Core i5-2520M handling the job with its processor cores.
The results aren’t altogether surprising. Fixed-function logic is designed to perform one task well, and that’s exactly what Quick Sync does. For as flexible as general-purpose resources can be, don’t expect an integrated graphics engine to ever be as fast or as power-efficient as Quick Sync in an application actually optimized for Intel’s Media SDK.