With VirtualDub we converted a full-length DVD movie to DivX format and saw how long it took for this conversion to be completed. The DivX codec is capable of recognizing and using not only more than one CPU (i.e., more than one core) but also the new SSE4 instruction set, so we expect that CPUs with SSE4 support reach a higher performance here.

The movie we chose to convert was Star Trek – The Motion Picture: Director’s Cut. We copied the movie to our hard disk drive with no compression, so the final original file on our HDD was 6.79 GB. After compressing it with DivX, the final file was only 767.40 MB, which is quite remarkable.

The results below are given in seconds, so the lower the better.

VirtualDub supports SSE4, a new instruction set that is available on Core 2 Dup E7200 but not on Core 2 Duo E6600 or Core 2 Duo E6700. So we made two tests here, with SSE4 support disabled ("w/o SSE4" on the above chart) and with SSE4 enabled ("w/ SSE4" on the above chart). 

With SSE4 disabled, Core 2 Duo E7200 achieved a performance similar to Core 2 Duo E6700, being 7.38% faster than Core 2 Duo E6600.

But when we enabled SSE4 support performance increased 24% and Core 2 Duo E7200 was 22.44% faster than Core 2 Duo E6700 and 29.61% faster than Core 2 Duo E6600.