What processor for encoding?

[SirCanealot]

Hey fellow fanshrubbing peoples, long time no see.

I'm vagually thinking of getting back into some video related things once I've completed my computer upgrade.

However, what sort of processor would the rest of you recomend for encoding?

I had my mind set on a Core 2 Duo and overclocking the heck out of it, but I've seen some benchmarks recently of x264 running on quad cores, and the speed increase looked interesting.

So what does everyone think? Do the builds fansubbers use of x264 support quad core properly and stuff? What else everyone else using these days?

Either way it's REALLY not about this Atholn 64 @ 2.33ghz I have right now, hahaha...

Thanks!

[jfs]

Just get the fastest Core 2 Quad you can afford. Also make sure to stuff a rather large amount of RAM into the machine, and running a 64 bit OS doesn't hurt. (Now, there is no 64 bit Avisynth worth speaking of, so you won't get any major gains in that end.)

Also, if you can't fill all the cores running a single job multithreaded, run multiple jobs with fewer threads.

[SirCanealot]

Does x264 need a lot of ram these days? I never needed more than a few hundred megs for encoding, until I started running massive AVS scripts.

And what do you mean? I can't encoding a single file and have it fill up all 4 cores? So if I was just running single jobs, I may as well go and get a double core?

And I'll be sticking to my stripped down XP SP2 thanks, heheh

[Dark Shikari]

x264 does not need much RAM at all (think dozens of megabytes, not hundreds). Most of the RAM usage comes from AviSynth, which you can limit with SetMemoryMax (I think it uses 1/4 of your RAM max by default). The current threading model can fill a quadcore easily on all but the fastest settings.

For speed, you just want the fastest Core 2 Quad you can get. RAM speed is not very important.

If you want an extra 15% speed or so, run under 64-bit *nix. If you want to use Avisynth in such a case its a bit of a hassle; you have to do wine avs2yuv piped to x264.

[dragon5152]

I use q6600, watercooled and burning at a cool 1.45v
Running at 3.6ghz currently...

[jfs]

My point with "if you can't fill all the cores" was that not all Avisynth filters or other effects can be scaled to multiple CPU's well, and in that case it's better to use "manual" parallelism. And if you're going to do that you will also need more RAM.

[Tofusensei]

-bash-2.05b$ cat /var/run/dmesg.boot | grep CPU
CPU: Cyrix 6x86MX (224.54-MHz 686-class CPU)



-Tofu

[emptyeighty]

Originally Posted by Tofusensei

-bash-2.05b$ cat /var/run/dmesg.boot | grep CPU
CPU: Cyrix 6x86MX (224.54-MHz 686-class CPU)



-Tofu

We expect your first h.264 encode in 2021 then.

[Tofusensei]

Haha, I'm gonna try one and see what happens.

[Dark Shikari]

Originally Posted by emptyeighty

We expect your first h.264 encode in 2021 then.

Reminds me of this...

(referring to changes which break encoding on Pentium 1s)
<Dark_Shikari> <Snowknight26> but but but
<Dark_Shikari> <Snowknight26> thats what i do all my encoding on
<Dark_Shikari> (referring to a pentium 1 machine)
<pengvado> it's obviously no hardship for him. his (singular) encode won't finish for a while yet, so he can't have upgraded to the new x264

[martino]

I personally like my Duo, and wouldn't really want to change it for a Quad. In the end, bigger part of the time is still spent on actual AviSynth filtering, which doesn't natively support multi-threading (yet?) as neither do (most?) filters, rather than x264 encoding. Therefore I personally think that more Hz better than more cores (2 vs 4) in general, atm. But yeah, if most of your time will be spent on x264 and have money to shell out, go for a Quad. Also as jfs mentioned; Don't forget RAM. I have 3GB and sometimes have problems with that... :/

[SirCanealot]

Originally Posted by jfs

My point with "if you can't fill all the cores" was that not all Avisynth filters or other effects can be scaled to multiple CPU's well, and in that case it's better to use "manual" parallelism. And if you're going to do that you will also need more RAM.

I wouldn't really be fond of splitting filters across cores since I put the filter chain in a certain order for a reason. Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

But I've always filtered to a huffy file before encoding to 264. A quad core will far speed huffy-h.264, right? The main thing that annoyed me about encoding and 264 in the past is spending 4 hours encoding just to correct a typo. Main reason why I was thinking quad core.

And what sort of FPS do people get on their systems when filtering, and when going from lossless-264? Especially interested in what dragon5152 has to say :P

[Tofusensei]

Originally Posted by SirCanealot

And what sort of FPS do people get on their systems when filtering, and when going from lossless-264? Especially interested in what dragon5152 has to say :P

A guy in DB (no, not timecop) has a dual quad core (that's 8 cores) and we were running tests...

He was getting about 11 fps on ae-maxquality and hq-insane... For comparison, I get about 1.6 on my lowly 3.2 Ghz P4.

-Tofu

[SirCanealot]

Originally Posted by Tofusensei

A guy in DB (no, not timecop) has a dual quad core (that's 8 cores) and we were running tests...

He was getting about 11 fps on ae-maxquality and hq-insane... For comparison, I get about 1.6 on my lowly 3.2 Ghz P4.

-Tofu

Wait, do you mean 8 cores by that? WTF? And only 11fps??!?!?!? Stupid x264! :P

And yeah, I'd get about 2-3 on my Atholn...

[Tofusensei]

Originally Posted by SirCanealot

Wait, do you mean 8 cores by that? WTF? And only 11fps??!?!?!? Stupid x264! :P

And yeah, I'd get about 2-3 on my Atholn...

I'm pretty sure it was only really utilizing 4 of the cores at a time... So to get maximum efficiency you'd need a better SMP-supported OS or just run two encodes at once.

-Tofu

[SirCanealot]

Ahh, okay :P

Still, that's pretty darn scary. He could be encoding QC encodes, etc, and messing with his filters at the same time!! :O

Anyway, from this I'll probably go with dual core. I'm broke as hell, but my PC is acting weird as hell, and I really need a new PSU and another HD too, so... sod the extra £80 or so that a quad core will cost :P

[Daiz]

Originally Posted by SirCanealot

But I've always filtered to a huffy file before encoding to 264. A quad core will far speed huffy-h.264, right? The main thing that annoyed me about encoding and 264 in the past is spending 4 hours encoding just to correct a typo. Main reason why I was thinking quad core.

Actually lossless H.264 (encoded with --no-cabac) provides the best speeds, especially when used with DSS2 and CoreAVC to input it to x264.

See http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost...&postcount=528 for more information.

[SirCanealot]

Originally Posted by Daiz

Actually lossless H.264 (encoded with --no-cabac) provides the best speeds, especially when used with DSS2 and CoreAVC to input it to x264.

See http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost...&postcount=528 for more information.

That's stupidly interesting! Thanks a bunch for the info!

Payday is on the 21st. Still too damn far away!

[Potatochobit]

any dual core computer tears through encodes.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14756

new processors coming out again this fall, dont waste your money.
I didnt get a quad core over last winter yet because of this. the q6600 prices are dropping though, so you can get a good deal on some quad cores and it would not be a bad idea to upgrade. keep in mind, you will need to add in the price of a new motherboard if you were planning to do this yourself. whatever you do, just do not get a phenom right now.

[martino]

*waiting for the new Intel platform before his new upgrade :P

Maybe if you can wait for a while... It could be worth it, but prices will be probably quite nasty at the start.