Multitasking musings
AMD has been highlighting what it calls 'megatasking' in its marketing literature for Quad FX. This apparently means a few strange things like running two games at once whilst encoding HD. But there is at least some sense to the idea of being able to encode multiple video streams at the same time whilst playing a game - you could be serving video to other systems round your house, which must be encoded on the fly to fit the available bandwidth on your home network. We're currently working on some benchmarks to evaluate this in a repeatable fashion, so we will bring you these results in a future article. For now, we've concentrated on the same multitasking scenarios we developed to test Intel's quad-core processors.
Our first scenario consisted of running our DivX encoding test whilst playing a 720p QuickTime movie, and recording how long the encode took. Our second scenario involved running the DivX encode whilst playing Quake 4 at 1,024 x 768, recording both the time taken and the Quake 4 frame rate. Our final scenario involved our subjective experience of playing Quake 4 with a batch of DivX encodes running in the background - a likely activity.
Quad FX was clearly better at encoding video at the same time as playing HD than the Athlon 64 FX-62. But it's still not even as good at this as Intel's Core 2 Extreme X6800.
Similarly, gaming and video encoding simultaneously on Quad FX will provide both faster frame rates and faster encodes than a dual-core Athlon 64. But again Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is better still.
