Maybe it's just that app you are using? Have you tried some other similar software?
I already have a license for this app, it cost me $100.
I use this app not because it is the fastest or the cheapest but because TMPGEnc is known for having the best IQ/bitrate when it comes to MPEG2 compression.
If the race was to find the best FPS out there, sans concern for IQ or bit-rate, then I'm sure there is no shortage of ways to get there (including transcoding with a GPU - very fast and totally crap results can be had )
There have got to be people in the transcoding industry who know the best optimizations that would tease the same (or better) IQ/bitrate out of the FX8350 at much better FPS. I just wish they'd get with the TMPGEnc people and give them the secrets
Is it 40%? I was looking at the last dot of the Q6600, (3.5?) from there it looks like 40FPS vs 30FPS, so on a clock-to-clock basis it's 33%, although it (Q6600) does seem to be scaling poorer as the clock increases.
Out of the box, of course, hands down the FX8350 performs better. This is not news, because AMD has been beating the Q6600 in out-of-the-box performance since higher-clocked Denebs (Q6600 is clocked pretty low), then Thubans, then Bulldozer. I therefore assumed Homeles' comment was in some context other than out-of-the-box, although I admittedly may have settled unfairly on an IPC / per-core context that was unwarrated, which led me to conclude it's still not a major ass-whooping architecturally against the Core2Quad, since it has 100% more cores, but only manages 33% more performance clock to clock.
The best fit equations are on the graph, I just used those for scaling to 4GHz, but I compared the actual stock results (red dots in the graph) for the stock comparison.
(10.223*4+5.3464)/(6.4247*4+7.1302) = 1.408 = 41% faster
46.15/22.24 = 2.074 = 107% faster
Like you say though, given 2x the cores, faster memory subsystem, SSD vs HDD, etc - is it really all that surprising the FX8350 is 41% faster than the Q6600 rig at 4GHz?