There’s a case of suffering from success to be made for all the core counts AMD Threadrippers possess: not all software can effectively utilize all of them, especially as you scale beyond 64 cores and above. The open-source transcoding software HandBrake is one such example, and AMD says it recently received threading-related fixes, now allowing Team Red’s workstation processors to properly flex their massive compute muscles.
AMD Threadrippers Now Fully Utilized In HandBrake
The fixes were submitted to the HandBrake open-source project and accepted, and are included in version 1.11.0 and later; no workflow changes are required for users who update to the new version, and both Ryzen Threadripper and Threadripper PRO users are expected to see major performance gains. The update focuses on two aspects: core scaling, and scheduling overhead.
The first issue, as mentioned earlier, was that HandBrake prior to this was not designed work with systems featuring more than 64 logical processors. This has been a pretty common issue as Windows was known for its Processor Group limit that restricts each program to a maximum of 64 cores, with some workstation applications stuck to this limit as a result – in such cases, the excess number of processor cores simply do not get utilized, resulting in subpar performance relative to core count.
The second issue involved workloads being split into pieces that were too small, creating excess scheduling overhead. Per AMD, this was particularly evident in 720p tests, where coordination time consumed a disproportionate share of CPU processing time over transcoding work, causing performance to drop rather than scale with additional cores.
AMD compared HandBrake CLI 1.11.1 against HandBrake CLI 1.6.1 (selected as the baseline to isolate threading changes from later AMF preset changes) on two test systems, both using an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU. On a Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9995WX 96-core system, transcoding performance improved by up to 181% depending on workload. The largest single gain recorded was Perfume H.264 720p at +181%, followed by Perfume 4K HEVC 10-bit at +151% and LG 8K HEVC 8-bit at +149%.
On a Ryzen Threadripper 7980X 64-core system with 128GB DDR5-5600 memory, performance improved by up to 215%. The largest gain was Perfume H.264 720p at +215%, followed by LG 8K HEVC 8-bit at +203% and LG 8K 60fps HEVC 10-bit at +105%. Across all tested workloads on the HEDT system, improvements ranged from 16% to 215%.
With this new update, AMD Threadrippers should perform a lot faster than Intel’s Xeon series equivalents (without Intel QuickSync acceleration), though Team Blue’s new Xeon 6 series workstations is likely not far behind with the new Xeon 698X packing 86-cores in a single socket. Either way, video production houses with Threadrippers in their systems will certainly appreciate the free speed boost.
Pokdepinion: Rendering nearly 60FPS in one of the most extreme presets says a lot of just how insanely powerful AMD Threadrippers are.
