AMD has addressed threading bottlenecks in HandBrake that limited transcoding performance on high-core-count systems, with the fixes now included in HandBrake 1.11.0. The issues involved inefficient handling of systems with more than 64 logical processors and workloads divided into jobs that were too small, which increased scheduling overhead instead of improving throughput.
The problems were especially visible on Threadripper systems, where available compute could sit idle as more cores were assigned. AMD found cases where performance dropped by up to 60% rather than scaling, with 720p workloads particularly affected. The updated thread management and job scheduling are designed to distribute transcoding work more effectively across many cores.
According to AMD, a Threadripper 7980X (64 cores, 128 threads) with 128 GB of DDR5-5600 and a Radeon RX 9070 XT delivered 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 tested workloads, improvements ranged from 16% to 215%. A Threadripper PRO 9995WX (96 cores, 192 threads) with the same RX 9070 XT reached gains of up to 181% in HEVC, depending on the workload.
