Video Encoding

3D graphics performance is not the only important parameter. The performance of the video subsystem during video encoding becomes almost as important lately. The thing is that as the high-definition video gets more and more popular, the encoding of the video stream becomes a much harder task for the CPU. That is why the developers of new graphics solutions, including the integrated ones pay special attention to functions that would allows to unload the CPU during video content encoding.

In order to test how well the integrated solutions participating in our today?s review could cope with video encoding tasks, we measured the CPU utilization during the playback of different HD trailers in MPEG-2, H.264 or Microsoft VC1 format.

The charts below show the average CPU utilization that we observed during the 2-minute playback in each of the above mentioned HD formats. So, the smaller is the value, the better is the result.

As we see, platforms built using Intel components cope slightly better with video encoding than the platforms using AMD processors and Nvidia chipsets. So, we can conclude that HD video support is bets implemented in Intel GMA X3000 graphics core, which would be our first recommendation for home entertainment systems. However, the differences in CPU utilization are not that dramatic and can also be explained by the higher performance of the Core 2 Duo E6300 processor.