do discrete gfx chips improve video encoding performance?

[ljwobker]

So this is a somewhat specific question, but I figure there's a good a chance of someone knowing here as anywhere else.

I've got a T400 with discrete graphics, but I have them completely disabled in BIOS. Part of this is historical (I ran an OS without switching-support for a long time) and part is because I've never needed the additional GFX horsepower and didn't want to burn the incremental power.

I'm now on windows7 so the switchable stuff should work... but I'm wondering if anyone knows whether the discrete graphics provides any performance improvement for video encoding (specifically h.264 via Handbrake).... if it does and it's significant I will likely go through the mess of adding drivers, etc... otherwise I'll just leave it.

thanks...

[Colonel O'Neill]

Not sure if AMD has a H.264 encoder. I'm sure it's possible, but may be a bit tricky mushing together Lenovo's switchable package with the latest AMD Catalyst.

[ThinkRob]

do discrete gfx chips improve video encoding performance?

No.

Encoding is almost invariably CPU-bound.

The only exception would be if you are using one of the (very, very few) GPU-based encoders. But considering that their quality tends to be vastly inferior to software encoders, that's usually a moot point. I only know of GPU-based encoders for H.264 -- and they all get absolutely trounced by x264 when it comes to output quality (and compression performance).