Jim,
Bill and I are testing this extensively for the new PPBM6 test and on our current time-line, which is an AVCHD 1080i-29.97 source with numerous effects, fast color corrector, brightnes & contrast, gamma correction, gaussian blur and 3-way color corrector and speed slowed down by 50%, for a total duration of 2;39;04 exporting to MPEG2-DVD with a preset of NTSC 23.976 Widescreen High Quality I have just tested again the export times and it gave me the following results:
| System | Hardware MPE On, MRQ Off | Hardware MPE On, MRQ On | Software MPE, MRQ On |
|---|---|---|---|
i7-3930K, GTX 680 | 24 s | 24 s | 436 s (94 without MRQ) |
i7-2600K, GTX 680 | NA | 33 s | 870 s |
i7-980X, GTX 680 | NA | 30 s | 556 s |
Now this test is taxing on the GPU, because there is frame blending, scaling and blurring going on during export, but I can not see any difference with or without MRQ with hardware MPE turned on. I ran several runs and they are consistently between 23 and 24 seconds on this test. Several things of interest here, the advantage the 6-cores have over a 4-core when using software mode only, and the difference between MRQ settings in software mode MPE.
PS. You may be testing this with AME instead of Direct Export. AME is seriously handicapped in CS6 and that may be the cause of your strange results. How does it look with your same test when you use Direct Export, because exporting a 1 minute clip without effects taking 1 minute contrasts seriously with my export of 24 seconds for a clip 2.5 times longer and filled with effects. You know that both Bill and I have rather tuned systems and when our software MPE exports take this long (436 - 870 seconds) there is something going on here I would like to know more about.