A HandBrake update just gave Threadripper owners up to a 215% performance boost for free

AMD has worked with the HandBrake development team to fix two threading bottlenecks that were affecting transcoding performance on high-core-count Threadripper CPUs. The fixes are included in HandBrake 1.11.0 and later, and the results are significant enough that owners of existing Threadripper hardware can expect a substantial free performance boost simply by updating the software.

According to AMD, video transcoding workloads generally benefit from higher core counts. However, that was not always the case with its Threadripper lineup, where performance sometimes scaled in the opposite direction, particularly at lower resolutions, resulting in longer transcode times. AMD says it identified two key causes behind the issue.

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First, HandBrake wasn't built to manage systems with more than 64 logical processors. On chips like Threadripper, which have far more than 64 threads, the application left compute resources idle rather than distributing work across all available cores.

Second, some workloads divided jobs into pieces that were too small, creating scheduling overhead that actually hurt performance. In lower-resolution transcoding scenarios like 720p, the CPU spent more time coordinating tiny tasks than actually encoding. AMD found that, in some cases, these issues combined to reduce performance by up to 60% relative to what the hardware should have been capable of.

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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 rather than coordination overhead. And the performance gains speak for themselves.

The AMD Threadripper PRO 9995WX 96-Core CPU now delivers up to a 181% boost in performance, while the Ryzen Threadripper 7980X 64-Core CPU delivers a 215% boost. The two systems were compared using HandBrake CLI 1.11.1 and 1.6.1.

It is worth noting that these improvements are not exclusive to AMD. HandBrake is open source, and the threading fixes apply to any high-core-count CPU. Intel Xeon HEDT users will see similar benefits from the same changes.