Thursday, June 18th 2026
AMD Threadripper Unlocks Massive 215% HandBrake Performance Boost
AMD has fixed a couple of threading bottlenecks in HandBrake that were holding back transcoding performance on high-core-count systems, and the fixes have been included in HandBrake 1.11.0. AMD found that the issues came down to two things. HandBrake wasn't built to efficiently manage systems with more than 64 logical processors, so on chips like Threadripper, available compute was sitting idle instead of being put to work. Separately, some workloads were chopped into jobs that were too small, creating scheduling overhead that affected the actual transcoding time, particularly noticeable at 720p. AMD found cases where performance actually dropped by up to 60% rather than scaling as more cores were assigned. The fix improves thread management and job scheduling so HandBrake can split work more effectively across high core counts, keeping more cores busy with actual transcoding instead of coordination overhead.
According to an AMD blog post, a Threadripper 7980X (64 cores, 128 threads) CPU with 128 GB of DDR5-5600 paired with a Radeon RX 9070 XT measured gains up to 215% in Perfume H.264 720p, 203% in LG_8K HEVC 8-bit 4320p and 105% in LG 8K 60 FPS HEVC 10-bit 4320p. Across all the tested workloads, improvements ranged from 16% to 215%. In HEVC, a Threadripper PRO 9995WX (96 cores, 192 threads) with the same RX 9070 XT achieved gains of up to 181%, depending on the workload. The biggest gains were up to 181% in Perfume H.264 720p, 151% in Perfume HEVC 10-bit 2160p and 149% in LG_8K HEVC 8-bit 4320p.
To take advantage of the better scaling, users just need to update to HandBrake 1.11.0 or later, as there are no new workflow steps, presets, or settings to manage.
Source:
AMD Blog
According to an AMD blog post, a Threadripper 7980X (64 cores, 128 threads) CPU with 128 GB of DDR5-5600 paired with a Radeon RX 9070 XT measured gains up to 215% in Perfume H.264 720p, 203% in LG_8K HEVC 8-bit 4320p and 105% in LG 8K 60 FPS HEVC 10-bit 4320p. Across all the tested workloads, improvements ranged from 16% to 215%. In HEVC, a Threadripper PRO 9995WX (96 cores, 192 threads) with the same RX 9070 XT achieved gains of up to 181%, depending on the workload. The biggest gains were up to 181% in Perfume H.264 720p, 151% in Perfume HEVC 10-bit 2160p and 149% in LG_8K HEVC 8-bit 4320p.
18 Comments on AMD Threadripper Unlocks Massive 215% HandBrake Performance Boost
It is an user error when invoking such software on such high core boxes and not splitting the task etc.
When AMD does not know what to do with "spare time", there are ignored CVE emails according to the media for over half a year, lots of AMD bug reports etc.
Since video encoding is by nature embarrassingly parallel, I find it surprising handbrake even needed tuning to scale properly.
Although the optimisation destroys the usefulness of handbrake as a benchmark to compare new and old results, since handbrake is also used for practical tasks, fixing the parallel scaling is good. Moreover, this will also improve speeds on high-core-count Intel processors as well.
In my opinion, a nice follow-up article would look at how the changes contributed by AMD also speed up Intel hardware.
Tell me about your childhood.
There are ARM processors, Chineasium processors, and even Apple hardware (I know its ARM based) and for hardcore IBM Power Processors.
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