HandBrake Video Transcode

We've added HandBrake to our list of media creation tests, as PCMark 8's video encoding test isn't able to make use of more than two threads and as such doesn't give a true representation of video encoding/editing workloads and performance. As this task is a key reason for opting for a powerful system, we've added a simple encoding test using the freely available HandBrake software, which converts a 60-second, 400MB, 4K, MKV video sample to a high quality 1080p MP4 file using the available presets. Our results show much better scaling with increasing threads, which is more indicative of high-performance video editing suites, albeit without any GPU acceleration.

PCMark 8 Photo Editing V2

This workload involves making a series of adjustments to a set of photographs using ImageMagik - an open-source image processing library - to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation and gamma. When a favourable balance is found, the changes are then applied to the rest of the images in the set. TIFF files up to 67MB in size are used.