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Rendering, Encoding & Compression
Rendering
Ryzen 7 CPUs find plenty of fans among the rendering crowd. AMD's Ryzen 7 2700 represents a solid step beyond the company's 1000-series processors in our multi-threaded tests. In fact, it often provided a similar performance level as the previous-generation 1800X flagship in our tests.
The Intel processors demonstrated their per-core advantage in our lightly threaded tests. Meanwhile, a stock Ryzen 7 2700X proved faster than the same chip overclocked in many of the same benchmarks, since its 4.3 GHz dual-core boost frequency is higher than our 4.2 GHz all-core overclock.
Encoding & Compression
LAME is a quintessential single-threaded workload that typically illustrates Intel's per-clock advantage. This time around, though, AMD's Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600X landed on top of the mighty Core i7-8700K in stock form.
Our threaded compression and decompression tests work directly from system memory, removing our SSDs from the equation. The Ryzen 7 2700 put its eight cores to good use, beating most of its competition.
There's a larger delta between Intel and AMD processors in our HandBrake x265 test compared to the x264 benchmark, given the former's heavier reliance on AVX instructions. AMD looks much better in both metrics than it used to, though. The improved multi-core Precision Boost 2 frequencies help level the playing field.
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