|
![](/i/fill.gif) |
My PC has a quad-core CPU with hyperthreading. Which means that Windows
claims it has 8 cores, and when I run POV-Ray, it claims to be using
12.5% CPU.
Right now, I have 4 copies of POV-Ray running, each working on a
different task. Each copy is using 12.5% CPU, and Windows reports a
total of 50% CPU usage. (In spite of the fact that I'm actually using
ALL the cores available.)
I wanted to get a quick preview of the animation being built, so I fired
up Virtual Dub. Imagine my surprise when I actually got 62.5% CPU! o_O
Somehow, each core is running a compute-bound task, and yet still had
enough spare cycles to run a /second/ compute-bound task in the
background as well!
(Also slightly unusual is seeing Virtual Dub actually compute-bound.
Usually it's I/O-bound. But in this case - decoding PNG and encoding
H.264 at 1280x720 - it seems to have become compute-bound.)
The only explanation I can come up with is that POV-Ray is using almost
exclusively floating-point arithmetic, while Virtual Dub is using almost
exclusively integer arithmetic. (Can you *do* a discrete cosine
transform in integer arithmetic alone? I didn't though you could...)
Post a reply to this message
|
![](/i/fill.gif) |