 Well today I have what I believe is going to be a fascinating episode for you guys. So let's start with video. Okay? So videos, everybody likes to watch videos. There's a few people these days who own tablets. There's a Motorola Zoom or a smartphone. There's an iPhone 4 and want to watch video on them. But not all these devices and not all the media players are compatible with every kind of media that you download or rip or whatever, however else you get your media. So you often have to transcode or convert the media from one format to another. So I'm going to be using Media Converter 7 for my testing today. This is actually a really cool little piece of software. It was $29.99 with a coupon code that I found very easily on their website. Okay? So I'm going to be using a 200 meg, it is a 3 minute 1080p file that was actually taken with... I'm sorry, you guys can actually see me. This camera, the SX1IS 1080p, I'm going to be outputting it to an iPad compatible format and I'm going to be doing it on a number of different platforms, a number of different ways. So I have three platforms I'm going to use and I'm going to be using kind of a best of, Intel 1155. So that's the Z68 chipset with a 2600K hyper threaded processor. That is the most expensive platform out of what I'll be using today. I have an AMD AM3 platform. I have a Crosshair 4 formula with a 6 core 1100T CPU. Bear in mind, of course, that the motherboard doesn't really have any impact on the performance in this case. It's a CPU limited thing. And finally, I have AMD socket FM1. So this is their new APU socket. So I've got a 3850 quad core APU here on an A75MAG55 motherboard. I'm going to be using all the same hardware across these different boards and platforms. So I'm going to be using 8 gigs of DDR3 memory. I've got the same power supply and Intel 510 series SSD on my test platform. Then on each platform, I'm going to transcode the video a different way. So I'm going to use a CPU. Then I'm going to use a GTX 580. Then I'm going to use a Radeon 6970. And finally, I'm going to use the integrated GPU. And we're going to compare how all these solutions perform against each other, whether we're using CPU, CUDA, Direct Compute, or in Intel 1155's case, Virtue, or the APU on AMD FM1. Let's see how it goes. OK. So my first two runs are done with the CPU, as well as with the GTX 580 using CUDA on the 1155 platform. And the one that I'm about to run, and the reason I'm stopping to tell you guys about it, is with Lucid Virtue. So all I have to do is turn Virtue on. There we go. The processor graphics are now enabled. Although I am plugged into the dedicated graphics card. So the IGP is working now. And I'm going to run it with this one and see how it goes. So I'll share results with you as I go here and as I discover what works better and what doesn't. So here's a bit of an update. I have the AMD FM1 system running right now. So I've got most of my results done for that. And I'm actually running it with the 6970 right now. So you can see that the GTX 580, due to its very high performance, actually outperforms the CPU by itself, which we expect. I mean, the CPU was the slowest out of all of our results, even on the 1155 platform, where it's a significantly faster CPU with hyperthreading. The IGP did beat the CPU, but maybe not by as much as I would like to see. And actually, here's something interesting. I also added on the 1155 platform. And I tested the GTX 550 to see how it would compare to the 580. So it's almost as slow as a CPU, and definitely slower than the IGP. So if you're using 1155 and a lower end graphics card, well, anything but a super high end graphics card, you may actually be better off with Virtue or using the CPU versus using CUDA. So here we go. We've got our result for the 6970. So here it is. It is 133. So you can see the 6970, once again, doesn't perform quite as well as the 580, but it's close. And then the IGP trails significantly behind those two due to it, well, being substantially slower. So I'm pretty much finished my data at this point, only to discover that it was all pretty much for nothing. So what I accidentally did was I used a video file, this one, which had already been converted from its large high bitrate self into a Windows Media audio file. So what I'm going to do second time around is I'll be using this one. This is a 1.64 gig file, whereas this is a 200 meg file by Axe-a-Modent. So this is a MOV file that is what is natively recorded by my camera. Then I'm going to convert this into an iPad format. So you can see the data I've got here with the other file. So the Intel QuickSync is a good performer. CUDA also performs quite well. OpenCL is a little bit behind CUDA, and then CPU is invariably the slowest solution. However, I just ran QuickSync on the new file, which is the Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 990x, or maybe it's a 980x unboxing, and it was done in 56 seconds. I am now running it on OpenCL. You can see the difference in performance between QuickSync and OpenCL on that already transcoded once file. This ran in 56 seconds, and it's already taken well over two minutes with OpenCL when we're doing a far more complicated file. So I'm going to just rerun everything, which is going to take me... Look at the time it is now already, which is going to take me another hour or hour and a half or whatever, and then I will be back with proper results for you guys. Okay, well I'm finally done. It took me another couple hours to finish up here, but I have the results, so I've just used my old chart, but all of the bottom results are the ones using the larger file and converting it to an iPad compatible format with MediaConverter 7. So let's have a look at the chart here, and we'll go through it together. So this is the 2600K. With the CPU alone, it clocks in at 1 minute 40 seconds, which is better than the 1100T, better than the 3850, and better than the i3-2105. So that makes a lot of sense, because this is more expensive than this, which is more expensive than this, which is almost the same as this. So this one you can see, due to its four cores, this is two cores with hyperthreading, this is six cores, four hyperthreaded cores. So this guy with his four cores performs better than the equivalently priced Intel CPU with only two cores. All right, now let's factor in CUDA. So we've got a GTX 580 now. So they actually all perform fairly similarly. This was a bit of a glitch, but I ran it again, and I don't know why, but the 1100T did not perform quite as well with my CUDA GTX 580 as the other cards did. With the 6950, we seem to see a lot more benefit from additional CPU power. So you can see that the 6950 is still an improvement over the CPU, but it doesn't... Like CUDA was very similar with the GTX 580 across the board, whereas the 6970, it seems like if you have a more powerful CPU to feed it, it is really able to ramp up the performance. So with the i3-2105, it clocked in at 246, with the 3850, 226, 209 with the 1100T, and a whopping one minute, 36 seconds with the 2600K. Now IGP performance, so the 1155, the 2600K, and the 2105 were both within spitting distance of each other, and in spite of this being a quad-core CPU that is clocked higher, this being a dual-core CPU. So you can see that the IGP is doing all the work here. It's not getting a whole lot of help from the CPU side, like we saw with the 6950. As for the FM1 solution, remember, unlike the Intel IGP with using Lucid Virtue, on the FM1 solution, you can only use it if you are running onboard video. This can be used if you're using a Z68 or H67 chipset. There's my Z68 board. This can be used even if you are running a discrete graphics card, so that's kind of a cool feature as well. So here you can see that the IGP did not perform as well as the 6970, but was still better than the CPU on its own. So hopefully this was helpful. Thanks for checking out my video on the different platforms and their video transcoding performance. Bear in mind, here's another quick thing to bear in mind, you guys, so you can see here that the, with the H67 or Z68 chipset, the 1155 chips, whether it's an i7 or an i3, just smoke everything else, but only a few software applications actually support all of these different hardware accelerations. So if you're using anything that doesn't, in terms of sheer CPU performance, you can see that the FM1 3850, due to its additional cores, blows away the equivalently priced from Intel, and then you have to spend quite a bit more to get better performance on the Intel side. Don't forget to subscribe, guys.