VIA Responds with KT400A, Five Months Later

Video Encoding Performance - DiVX/XMpeg 4.5

What was once reserved for "professional" use only has now become a task for many home PCs - media encoding. Today's media encoding requirements are more demanding than ever and are still some of the most intensive procedures you can run on your PC.

We'll start off with a "quick" conversion of a DVD rip (more specifically, Chapter 40 from the Star Wars Episode I DVD) to a DiVX MPEG-4 file. We used the latest DiVX codec (5.03) in conjunction with Xmpeg 4.5 to perform the encoding at 720 x 480.

We set the encoding speed to Fastest, disabled audio processing and left all of the remaining settings on their defaults. We recorded the last frame rate given during the encoding process as the progress bar hit 100%

MPEG-4 Video Encoding Performance MPEG-2 to DiVX Conversion using XMpeg 4.5 & DiVX 5.0.2 (Frames per Second - Higher is Better) NVIDIA nForce2 (333/DualDDR333) VIA KT400A (333/DDR333) 71.1 63.3 | 0 | 14 | 28 | 43 | 57 | 71 | 85

Despite all of the close performance calls in the gaming tests, the nForce2 still exudes dominance in the MPEG-4 conversion test, outperforming the KT400A by a significant margin of 12%.

Video Encoding Performance - Windows Media Encoder 9.0

For our next video encoding test we took Windows Media Encoder 9.0 and encoded the same chapter from the Star Wars Episode I DVD into a 2Mbps VBR WMV file using Media Encoder's built in 2Mbps DVD VBR settings. The time reported is in minutes to encode, lower being better obviously:

Windows Media 9 Encoding Performance Converting DVD to 2Mbps VBR - Lower is Better NVIDIA nForce2 (333/DualDDR333) VIA KT400A (333/DDR333) 10.23 10.25 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 12

The performance difference between the two platforms shrinks back to nil in the WME9 test.

Video Encoding Performance - Quicktime 6.0 Professional

Our final encoding test takes the same source file and encodes it to a MPEG-4 Quicktime file for streaming over the Internet. We used the Normal MPEG-4 settings for the conversion, and the time was recorded in minutes (lower being better).

Quicktime 6.0 Pro Encoding Performance Converting DVD to MPEG-4 Internet Stream - Lower is Better NVIDIA nForce2 (333/DualDDR333) VIA KT400A (333/DDR333) 2.93 3.00 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 4

Quicktime shows a 3% performance gap, but nothing as severe as what we saw in the Xmpeg test.