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i wish they covered things like x264/x265/av1/etc encoding/decoding performance and other benefits that aren't just gaming.
by SG- 2y ago
i wish they covered things like x264/x265/av1/etc encoding/decoding performance and other benefits that aren't just gaming.
- hggigg 2y ago100% agree with that. x265 transcoding gets done on my MBP regularly so I’d like to see that as a comparison point.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agowhat actually uses x265? I thought pretty much everyone used AV1 for their next gen codec.
- throwaway48476 2y agoHardware people don't mind paying licenses for x265 because they can just bake in the cost. It just causes problems for software, especially when it's free.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agoright, but if none of the software uses it, the hardware is pretty worthless.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoVideo software doesn't need to license the codec if the GPU driver takes care of it, right? If hardware accelerate decoding works, you just feed the binary video blob to the driver and it returns decoded frames.
- SahAssar 2y agoI'm not sure what requires a license as MS sells/sold a package to enable h265 even on devices that have hardware support, so some software fee seems to be required: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nmzlz57r3t7?hl=en-us&gl=US https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nmzlz57r3t7?hl=en-us&gl=U...
- pjmlp 2y agoProprietary software doesn't have such issues.
- acdha 2y agoThat’s only true if you’re writing the codec. If you’re calling the system APIs, you’re using Microsoft or Apple’s license. The last time I looked it was worth supporting because there was a 20 point gap in hardware support but that’s closed as each generation of hardware adds AV1 support.
- hggigg 2y agoMe when I want to transcode something to save a bit of disk space.
- TiredOfLife 2y agox265 is a cpu based H.265 encoder and is not accelerated.
- booi 2y agoIt’s probably just not that interesting. There’s generally a proprietary encode/decode pipeline on chip. It can generally handle most decode operations with CPU help and a very narrow encoding spec mostly built around being able to do it in realtime for broadcast. Most of the video you encode on a computer is actually all in software/CPU because the quality and efficiency is better.
- ramshanker 2y ago>>> It can generally handle most decode operations with CPU help and a very narrow encoding spec. This is so much spot on. Video coding specs are like a "huge bunch of tools" and encoders get to choose whatever subset-of-tools suits them. And than hardware gets frozen for a generation.
- Dalewyn 2y ago>Most of the video you encode on a computer is actually all in software/CPU because the quality and efficiency is better. That was the case up to like 5 to 10 years ago. These days it's all hardware encoded and hardware decoded, not the least because Joe Twitchtube Streamer can't and doesn't give a flying fuck about pulling 12 dozen levers to encode a bitstream thrice for the perfect encode that'll get shat on anyway by Joe Twitchtok Viewer who doesn't give a flying fuck about pulling 12 dozen levers and applying a dozen filters to get the perfect decode.
- wcfields 2y agoI agree, I never really cared about QSV as an Intel feature until I started doing Livestreams, using Plex/Jellyfin/Emby, and virtualizing/homelab work.
- WaxProlix 2y agoQuickSync passthrough should get you everything you need on i3+ chips. It's basically intel's only selling point in the homelab/home server space, and it's a big one. [Edit: I think I initially misread you - but I agree, it's a huge differentiator]
- close04 2y ago> It's basically intel's only selling point in the homelab/home server space In the homelab/home server space I always thought the OOB management provided by AMT/vPro is probably the biggest selling point. Manageability, especially OOB, is a huge deal for a lab/server. Anyone who used AMD's DASH knows why vPro is so far ahead here.
- BobbyTables2 2y agoIntel probably spends more on office supplies than they make from homelab customers…
- close04 2y agoMaybe, but I wasn't thinking of Intel's profit. The question was what might be a bigger selling point in a home lab, QuickSync for transcode related tasks (your Plex/Jellyfin machine for example, which would also work with most Nvidia GPUs and some AMD ones), or OOB manageability for your entire home lab especially if it's composed of multiple machines and IP KVMs quickly become cumbersome.
- Wytwwww 2y ago> Nvidia GPUs You would need an actual GPU, though. Massively increasing cost, power usage etc. without providing any real value in return for many use cases and AFAIK HW transcoding with Plex doesn't even work properly with with AMDs iGPUs? The N100 can transcode 4k streams at ~20w while costing barely more than a Raspberry Pi.
- wtallis 2y agoVideo encode and decode aren't really GPU functions. They're totally separate IP blocks from the 3D graphics/vector compute part of the GPU. On Intel's previous laptop processor generation (Meteor Lake), the video encode and decode blocks were on an entirely different piece of silicon from the GPU.
- adrian_b 2y agoTrue. The display controller is also a different block, separated from the GPU and from the video codecs. While on Lunar Lake the GPU and the video codec block are on the same tile, they are still in different locations on the compute tile. In the new Arrow Lake S desktop CPU, to be announced tomorrow, the GPU is extracted on a separate tile, like in Meteor Lake, while the other two blocks related to video output, i.e. the video codec block and the display controller block, are located on a tile that contains the memory controller and a part of the peripheral interfaces and which is made using a lower-resolution TSMC process than the CPU and GPU tiles.
- jsheard 2y agoBenchmarking hardware encode is also a pretty specialized rabbit hole since it's not just the performance that varies, but also the quality of the results.
- dyingkneepad 2y ago> the video encode and decode blocks were on an entirely different piece of silicon from the GPU. As far as I understand this is not true. It's a different engine within the graphics device, and it shares the execution units.
- shadeslayer 2y agoAFAIK the video encode/decode pipeline is separate from the graphics pipeline. But they do reside on the graphics tile.
- wtallis 2y agoFor Meteor Lake, Intel provided slides to the press that clearly labeled media blocks on the SoC tile, not the GPU tile. The hardware encode and decode also definitely does not use the shader execution units.
- pa7ch 2y agoAgreed, my laptop burns a lot of battery on AV1 video and I'd like information on how chips with AV1 decode perform with chrome.
- Remnant44 2y agoAs mentioned in other responses, that part of the GPU simply isn't interesting from an architectural perspective, which is what Chips and Cheese is all about. GPU compute performance is both technically interesting, and matters to much more than simply gaming!