AMD has unlocked upto 215% higher performance on its Threadripper CPUs in Handbrake through fixes.
Handbrake Was Limited To 64-Cores, AMD Managed To Fix That & Brought Up To 215% Higher Performance With its Threadripper CPUs
AMD worked with HandBrake to fix the missing performance on its Threadripper CPUs, bringing a 181% increase in transcoding performance on its Threadripper PRO and 215% boost on its Ryzen Threadripper CPU lineup.
According to AMD, Video transcoding applications such as Handbrake benefit massively from higher core counts, but that wasn't exactly the case with its Threadripper lineup, where the CPU performance didn't scale; instead, it dropped, especially on lower resolutions, in which the CPU overhead led to higher transcode times.
Two issues were discovered to be the primary cause behind this. These issues led to 60% drop in performance:
- Limited scaling beyond 64 logical processors: HandBrake was not designed to efficiently manage systems with more than 64 logical processors. On high-core-count CPUs, this meant the application could leave available compute resources underused instead of keeping all available processor cores busy.
- Work split into overly small jobs: Some workloads were divided into pieces that were too small. This created extra scheduling overhead, especially in 720p tests, where the CPU could spend too much time coordinating work instead of doing the transcode itself.
With Handbrake 1.11.0 (and later versions), AMD addressed this with a fix that managed work across high-core count CPUs, such as the Threadripper series, better. The changes include improved thread management and job scheduling, allowing HandBrake to divide transcode work effectively across more cores.
The result is a massive performance boost that should've been there from the start. The AMD Threadripper PRO 9995WX 96-Core CPU now delivers up to a 181% boost in performance, while the Ryzen Threadripper 7980X 64-Core CPU delivers a 215% boost. The two systems used were compared with HandBrake CLI 1.11.1 versus CLI 1.6.1.
The performance varies from workload to workload, but the full breakdown can be seen in the charts below:
The largest gains in the Threadripper PRO data shown were:
- Perfume H.264 720p +181%
- Perfume HEVC 10-bit 2160p +151%
- LG_8K HEVC 8-bit 4320p +149%
- LG 8K 60fps HEVC 10-bit 4320p +145%
- Perfume HEVC 10-bit 1080p +91%
The largest gains in the Threadripper HEDT data shown were:
- Perfume H.264 720p +215%
- LG_8K HEVC 8-bit 4320p +203%
- LG 8K 60fps HEVC 10-bit 4320p +105%
- Perfume HEVC 10-bit 1080p +73%
- Perfume HEVC 10-bit 2160p +63%
This is great work by AMD's CPU and Threadripper team, who managed to deliver the fixes for HandBrake for higher video transcode performance and capabilities.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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