High Motion Software has updated its powerhouse image processor ImBatch with multithreading support for even greater performance.

The new feature is only available in the $29.95 licensed edition, but is it worth the money? We took a look.

We used a test set of 345 PNG images, 918 megapixels in total, and set up only two processing tasks: just a “Sharpen” and a “Save as JPG”.

Running this job with a single thread took 266 seconds on our test system.

Repeating the process with four threads (after clearing the disk cache) cut execution time to 77 seconds, that’s 29% of the original time.

Using 4 threads gave us the most efficient CPU usage

Increasing the number of threads further accelerated performance, but not to the same degree (6 threads gave us a 61 second time, 23% of the original, 8 threads delivered 56 seconds or 21% of our starting time).

That’s still impressive, especially when you keep in mind that a lot of our run time was I/O bound (opening and saving files), and wouldn’t benefit from multithreading. If you typically run many more processing tasks – resize, crop, apply this effect, then another – you should also see much greater performance gains.

Is multithreading worth the $29.95 license? If you’re regularly running major batch processing tasks, we’d say yes, without question. The only issue is that you can’t “try before you buy”: change the “Processing Threads” version in the free-for-personal-use build and you’re just told to buy a license.

Fortunately ImBatch 5.0 Free has plenty of other useful improvements, including lossless JPEG transforms (flips and rotates), an Image Selection tool, improved text rendering in the Watermark Text task, and more.

ImBatch is available now for Windows XP and later.