Benchmark Results: MediaConverter 7.5
At long last, the fixed-function Video Codec Engine is ready for testing, six months after its introduction in the Radeon HD 7970!
AMD sent us a copy of Arcsoft’s MediaConverter 7.5, specially optimized to exploit VCE. We eagerly got it installed, anxious to see how the company’s multi-stream H.264 encoder improved performance.
Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect, slowing down our MPEG-2 and H.264 source files compared to our overclocked Core i7-3960X working on its own.
Of course, very few people have their own $1000 processor running at 4.2 GHz, so we asked AMD what it’d take to turn the tables and see the VCE-enabled result on top. The company admitted that VCE will play a more assistive role in lower-end platforms armed with Radeon HD 7800- or 7700-series cards. To that, we’d add desktops with Trinity-class APUs in them.
Perhaps the most ironic data points come from the GeForce GTX 680 and 670, though. The same AMD-supplied, AMD-optimized build of MediaConverter also supports CUDA, demonstrating that not all graphics cards get outperformed by fast CPUs in these workloads.
