x264 HD Benchmark 4.0

What Is x264 HD Benchmark? Simply put, it is a reproducible measure of fast your machine can encode a short HD-quality video clip into a high quality x264 video file. It's nice because everyone running it will use the same video clip and software. The video encoder (x264.exe) reports a fairly accurate internal benchmark (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All these factors make this an ideal benchmark to compare different processors and systems to each other.

What's x264? It's more or less the next generation Xvid/DivX codec.
You'll notice that the whole thing is pretty simplistic since I have no programming skills to speak of. The test simply consists of the needed executables and the video file all driven by a batch file that'll kick off the x264 encode and write a "results.txt" that you can upload along with your machine specs for comparison purposes (see reporting results below).



What's New In Version 4.0?

For starters, we updated the benchmark with revision 1913 of the x264 encoder, and CPU-Z 1.57. The new x264 encoder supports the following features :

8x8 and 4x4 adaptive spatial transform
Adaptive B-frame placement
B-frames as references / arbitrary frame order
CAVLC/CABAC entropy coding
Custom quantization matrices
Intra: all macroblock types (16x16, 8x8, 4x4, and PCM with all predictions)
Inter P: all partitions (from 16x16 down to 4x4)
Inter B: partitions from 16x16 down to 8x8 (including skip/direct)
Interlacing (MBAFF)
Multiple reference frames
Ratecontrol: constant quantizer, constant quality, single or multipass ABR, optional VBV
Scenecut detection
Spatial and temporal direct mode in B-frames, adaptive mode selection
Parallel encoding on multiple CPUs
Predictive lossless mode
Psy optimizations for detail retention (adaptive quantization, psy-RD, psy-trellis)
Zones for arbitrarily adjusting bitrate distribution