Which media apps really use dual core

monaco87 · 16 Jan 2006 at 13:25

I'm looking at a new cpu for a system that mainly does a lot of media encoding. I use TMPEG, & Ulead DVD Workshop 2 most of the time, also use Virtual Dub a bit. I've seen a lot of posts saying dual core is great for encoding but which media apps are REALLY multi threaded and therefore see a real benefit, rather than those which just "seem a bit faster".

I'm torn between dual core or a very high clock single core. Opterons are mostly out as they are so hard to find other than the 144.

aardvark · 16 Jan 2006 at 14:40

tmpeg xpress is, and i'm pretty sure tmpeg normal is - for encoding they are almost twice as fast.

any encoding app that is dual core is significantly faster than any single core cpu could hope to be - there are plently of benchmarks around that show this.

Biffa · 16 Jan 2006 at 15:17

Most Adobe products use Dual core fully, photoshop and premier are two off the top of my head that benchmarks show using dual cores to full effect.

Also the final rendering processes of things like StudioMax and Maya benefit hugely from multiple cpus

wam7 · 16 Jan 2006 at 18:53

Mainconcept also utilises dual core

aardvark · 16 Jan 2006 at 21:28

Biffa Also the final rendering processes of things like StudioMax and Maya benefit hugely from multiple cpus[/QUOTE said:
lightwave 8.5 has dual core support for the entire program, not only rendering, but i haven't got a dual core yet so can't try it ;(

FatRakoon · 18 Jan 2006 at 01:52

I read a while back about gaming with DC and IIRC it was on about Quake 3 and that DC actually slowed gaming down?

Now, its been a while and things will have probably changed, but are there any games out there that benefit from Dual core CPUs?

I have to as cos I recently got an X2 4800 and to be honest, I found absolutely no benefit from it whatsoever, and in fact for a lot of things, its slower.... ( CPU for CPU wise anyway and I dont think I have anythign that makes use of it other than it tellign my I have 2 CPUs instead of one! )

NathanE · 18 Jan 2006 at 08:46

It's not that dual core slows down Quake3 it's that Q3 slows itself down because it attempts to be SMP-compatible but fails miserably.

There's a couple games now with explicit dual core support... FEAR, Quake 4 (OTOH)... To be honest though, all games will benefit in some ways. Not through frame rate usually, but just through "smoothness". Windows will make the game run on one core and all your background stuff (e.g. Norton bloatware, background services, P2P downloads) run on the other core. This way the game is not contended for CPU time - it can get it whenever it wants pretty much.