For me, gaming is mostly an after-thought when it comes to what I do with my computers. And even then what little gaming I do, it is usually with legacy games that aren't very demanding. (my most modern game is Dragon Age: Origins)
When it comes to compute-intensive tasks, I use three very specific apps: TMPGEnc (transcoding DVDs), Gaussian (computational chemistry), and Metatrader (programming foreign currency trading algorithms).
When it comes to transcoding DVDs there is no shortage of apps out there. I specifically use TMPGEnc because it gives me the kind of IQ (image quality) that I want at the smallest bit-rate (smallest filesize) that I need so I can cram as many movies and episodes onto a dual-layer DVD disk as possible (or hard-drive on my HTPC).
When transcoding with the goal of reducing file-size while maintaining IQ, eliminating video noise is absolutely critical. Pixel noise takes up a lot of your available bandwidth because the compression algorithms will attempt to replicate the video noise as much as possible, leaving less bits per second to allocate towards attempting to faithfully replicate the rest of the image.
To this end I tend to remove both spatial and temporal video noise, which makes the transcode process time-intensive in its own right, in addition to then attempting to compress the images further while maintaining good image quality.
To benchmark the transcoding performance with TMPGEnc VMW 5 (Ver 5.3.1.85), I ripped a portion of one of my daughter's little mermaid dvd's which contained an 8 minute short movie clip of
Mermbabies (a movie clip from the 1938). In its original format on the DVD the clip consumed 599MB, I transcoded the movie clip (applying spatial and temporal video de-noise filters) and compressed the bandwidth to 3.7Mbps which results in a final file size of 231MB...reducing its footprint to ~38% the original size without sacrificing the image quality (as far as my layman's eye can tell).
Everything about this particular transcode job is very much a realistic proxy for how I transcode most of my children's animated movies and episodes. Using the trial version of TMPGEnc VMW 5 (Ver 5.3.1.85) I benchmarked the transcoding job time for Mermbabies at different clockspeeds and compiled the following results:
This really shocked me. Based on the general consensus on the web - that bulldozer/piledriver may suck at single-threaded apps but it rulez when it comes to multi-threaded apps (particularly transcoding apps) - I have every expectation that the FX-8350 would dominate this specific application without question.
And yet it comes up way short.
A note regarding hardware configurations - the 3770k and fx8350 rigs are identically configured (same DDR3-1866 ram, GTX460 vcard, OCZ V3 ssd, Win7 x64 ult, etc), whereas the Q6600 rig is outdated with WinXP, 4GB DDR2-734, 160GB spindle hdd and passive cooled ATI vcard from 2006.
That said, at 4.5GHz the FX-8350 barely bests the 3770K clocked at 3GHz
Oh well then, so I won't be using my FX-8350 as my main transcode computer. I've got two other dedicated workstations I can farm it out for (gaussian and metatrader)...so let's see which it is going to be best at. (next post)