AMD Threadripper Up to 215% More Efficient on HandBrake with Latest Update

AMD has announced the availability of optimizations for HandBrake that allow Ryzen Threadripper and Threadripper PRO processors to deliver significantly superior video transcoding performance compared to the past. In some scenarios, improvements reach as high as 215%, simply by installing HandBrake 1.11.0 or a later version.

In its blog post, AMD explained that video transcoding applications typically benefit from a high number of cores, but this behavior was not observed on Threadripper systems. In some cases, the increase in available cores actually resulted in worse performance, with a decrease of up to 60%, especially in lower resolution processing like 720p content.

AMD and the HandBrake developers identified two main issues. The first was related to managing systems with more than 64 logical processors, a condition that caused the application to leave some of the available processing resources unused. The second issue concerned the division of workloads into tasks that were too small, an approach that increased scheduling overhead and detracted time from the actual transcoding operations.

With HandBrake 1.11.0, changes were introduced to thread management and process scheduling, allowing for a more efficient distribution of work across processors with a high number of cores and keeping a greater number of processing units engaged in video encoding tasks.

The results shared by AMD highlight particularly high gains. A system based on the Ryzen Threadripper 7980X, a processor with 64 cores and 128 threads, paired with 128 GB of DDR5-5600 memory and a Radeon RX 9070 XT, recorded increases of up to 215% in the Perfume H.264 test at 720p, up to 203% in the LG_8K HEVC test at 8-bit and 4320p resolution, and up to 105% in the LG 8K HEVC test at 60 fps at 10-bit. Across all tests performed, improvements ranged from 16% to 215%.

The Threadripper PRO 9995WX, equipped with 96 cores and 192 threads and tested with the same memory and GPU configuration, also showed very consistent progress. AMD highlighted a maximum increase of 181% in the Perfume H.264 test at 720p, 151% in the Perfume HEVC test at 10-bit and 2160p resolution, and 149% in the LG_8K HEVC benchmark at 8-bit and 4320p resolution.

The most interesting aspect is that users will not need to change presets, settings, or operating procedures. To take advantage of better scalability on high-core-count systems, it is sufficient to update the software to HandBrake 1.11.0 or a later version to automatically benefit from the optimizations developed by AMD and the project team.