What's more CPU intensive than rendering HD video?

[Protomize]

While I was rendering a 1080p video with Sony Vegas utilizing the CPU I watched as all four cores on my OC'd to 3.87ghz i5-3450 shot up to 100% and sometimes dipping to 80%. On my i7 laptop, when rendering video, I would just leave it alone until it was done to not risk freezing it. For the heck of it, I decided to play some Metro 2033 while my rig was still rendering the video. Despite the random stuttering every 10 seconds or so, the game still ran relatively smooth with the GPU load at 100% signifying that the GPU ( HD 7850 ) is still the bottleneck. The rendering time for the video did take longer than normal, but that's normal. Just wondering, what's more intensive on the CPU than rendering HD video other than stress testing programs?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Hard to say, it depends what they run and how well optimized. But I am sure HD video aint the most demanding if you did a search.

 

[turn_pike]

For encoding cpu benchmark, you need to make sure the system isnt bottlenecked by other stuff like the hard drive.Then maybe set the priority to Realtime.

Anyways, calculation would be one easy way to stress your cpu.
Programs like Prime95 are used to stress cpu for good reasons even though it is not their intended use.
You could also use your python interpreter to calculate some crazy number
like say : 2 to the power of 387493744839. Open four python interpreter and do similar thing to all four. Voila, all four cores will be 100% for quite a while.

 

[ShadowVVL]

3d rendering is quite intensive.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Any hard pure maths, calculating large prime numbers with Prime95 has been a standard stability test for CPUs, SuperPi does a similar thing calculating Pi, other math based functions include encryption of data.

These things tend to be simple calculations repeated over and over again iterating on a result of the previous calculation, this means there's no real input/output bottleneck like there can be with encoding media to a slow hard drive for example, or processing some large data set.

Ideally you want something that threads well across all cores, Prime95 doesn't you need to run one instance for each of your cores, same with SuperPi, a multi-threaded variant of this is available called HyperPi.

 

[Diogenes2]

Folding@Home will use 100% of all cores unless you specify otherwise.

Other applications will run, but sluggishly, depending on how you set things up.

 

[Krynj]

Other than stress testing programs, 3D rendering is probably near the top of the list. There's a ton of calculations involved when simulating real world lighting, shadows, specularity, shading, etc, etc. There's no such thing as a PC that's too fast when it comes to 3D rendering. Plenty of CPU horsepower and an abundance of RAM are necessary.

 

[Idontcare]

Just wondering, what's more intensive on the CPU than rendering HD video other than stress testing programs?

From experience, computational chemistry apps will do that - Gaussian is an example.

Also financial modeling programs used in the creation of autonomous algorithmic trading programs - backtesting with MetaTrader 4 is an example.

I think video transcoding is the most widely known app for pushing your CPU to its limits because most people watch videos as a pasttime so they are aware of the existence of the industry of video transcoding on home PCs whereas not too many people engage in computational chemistry or the optimization of self-coded autonomous trading programs from their living rooms

 

[Protomize]

Thanks for all the answers!

 

[jhu]

Yo mama

 

[Diogenes2]

Folding@Home = computational chemistry app..

 

[Spungo]

For encoding cpu benchmark, you need to make sure the system isnt bottlenecked by other stuff like the hard drive.Then maybe set the priority to Realtime.

Don't do that. It can cause the computer to lock up until it finishes doing whatever. Putting it to High can lock up as well. Above Normal is the highest priority you should set.

 

[Cogman]

What's more CPU intensive than rendering HD video?

Well, TBH once you hit 100% utilization, you are sort of at the peek of "CPU intensive". Everything that cause you to utilize 100% of your CPU is just as CPU intensive as video rendering.

Ok, I lie a little. Technically there is more to CPU utilization than what the OS reports, you could get your CPU a little hotter if you have an ideal mix of floating point operations, branches, cache thrashing, and integer operations. That, however, is somewhat of a complex situation to find yourself in. Not only that, but we are really only talking about minor increases in CPU thrashing by doing all of this vs just getting a regular program to have 100% utilization.

 

[hans007]

well you'd probably want to turn off any hardware acceleration like quicksync or video card based stuff for hd rendering so it actually works the cpu cores.

i'd figure a ray tracer which is all cpu would probably be pretty cpu intensive