Benchmarking The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 Processor

Sony Vegas 7.0a and DIVX 6.2.5

Sony Vegas 7.0a

The Vegas+DVD Production Suite combines Vegas 7, DVD Architect 4, and Dolby Digital AC-3 encoding software to offer an integrated environment for all phases of professional video, audio, DVD, and broadcast production. This suite lets you edit and process DV, HDV, SD/HD-SDI, and all XDCAM formats in real time, fine-tune audio with precision, and author surround sound, dual-layer DVDs.

DIVX 6.2.5 with XMPEG 5.03

For those that want a information on these software applications XMPEG is a multipurpose video encoding application, which takes MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 streams, or DVD- IFO video format and converts them to AVI or bbMPeg Encoder format, changing video parameters, frame rate and audio frequency. One of the most popular uses for XMPEG is to convert unencrypted DVD VOB files to either MPEG-1 (compatible with Panasonic/LSX Encoders) or to an AVI file (compatible with most codecs). XMPEG is a very widely used tool by those users who want to do more with their DVDs than just play them. It tries to achieve the maximum possible quality while minimizing the conversion impact and provides a straightforward approach to the MPEG1/2 to MPEG/AVI conversion. XMPEG uses ‘plug-ins’ to support output formats making the program more flexible by allowing for a wide variety of output options. In this test case the output format is DivX.

DivX is a format for digital video, much like MP3 is a format for digital music. The DivX codec is based on the MPEG-4 compression standard and can reduce an MPEG-2 video (the same format used for DVD) to ten percent of its original size. The DivX technology provides excellent compression and the resulting visual quality is virtually indistinguishable from a DVD.

We were able to evaluate processor performance using XMPEG 5.03 software with DivX 6.2.5 for transcoding an MPEG-2 stream into the DivX format.

The Intel Quad-core Kentsfield processor was able to complete the transcoding 29 seconds faster (27%) than the Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor X6800 that we compared it with.