Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I bought a SECOND GPU… but NOT for gaming – AV1 on Intel Arc”.
Foreign is an amazing amazing, video coding format. It’S faster, it’s got better quality and it’s going to be everywhere in a few short years. I want to be an early adopter of av1, but my GPU doesn’t support it and nvidia’s RTX 40 series is so expensive that it feels completely out of reach and besides, I don’t even need the extra gaming performance. Hey kid. We got all these Arc gpus.
Nobody wants they’re cheap as heck and they got the good stuff from behind the wall. Maybe there is a better way to be clear: I’m not suggesting that you actually buy an A380 for gaming, but we spent the last week exploring productivity and streaming workloads that could easily justify adding one of these to your current GPU. It’S really really cool, almost as cool as this Segway to our sponsor iFixit. Is your battery beginning to bulge. Looking for a new project, iFixit has you covered stay tuned to the end of the video to learn more about their battery replacement kits, it sounds like Madness. Buy a GPU only to never play games on it, but let me explain the problem. Perhaps, unsurprisingly is NVIDIA their new RTX 4000 series cards are staggeringly fast and come loaded with all the latest bells and whistles DLS S3 Hardware assisted av1, encoding and decoding, except they start at 900 US dollars, meaning that until amd’s rx7000 cards may be ride in and Save the day, almost no one can afford to go next. Gen bringing us to our unconventional proposal. Adding an arc GPU to your existing setup isn’t going to close the gap in terms of gaming performance, but what it can do is modernize the features that your PC supports, enabling you to get the most out of Next Generation, DisplayPort 2.0 monitors and, more importantly, properly Handle av1 media now I know I know Hardware support for media codex, isn’t the sexiest topic, but imagine a world without it. If your phone had to use its general purpose, CPU course for video decoding, you might get an hour, maybe two hours of screen time watching YouTube videos, not that you’d want to hold it in your hand, for that long and without Hardware, accelerated encoding, your M1 MacBook Air could easily take 30 minutes to export a video rather than three the difference in both power efficiency and performance.
Really. Is that Stark which raises the question: why don’t we use Hardware acceleration for everything? Ah, I’m glad you asked all other things being equal. The cost of a microprocessor is proportional to its physical size and, while fixed function, Hardware like a media, decoder or encoder is really great. At that one thing: it is basically useless for anything else and it adds cost to every single chip. So unless you are darn sure that every customer is going to use, it, you’d probably be better off, leaving out that fixed function. Hardware and beefing up your more versatile general purpose, processing course.
All of which means that, given that Nvidia AMD and Intel are all on board, av1 must be a pretty big deal. It is, if you use the internet, you will eventually benefit from av1, even if you don’t realize it, that’s because the biggest users of av1 are going to be Mega corporations like Amazon, Disney and Google. How do I know because it’s going to save them a lot of money to start with av1 is entirely open, source and royalty free, making it super cheap to implement at scale. The ubiquitous h.264 codec has been outdated for a long time, but the reason we’re still stuck with it is because more modern Alternatives, like h.265 cost operators between 20 and 120 cents per device which, for our company with as many users as twitch, adds up pretty fast Of course, if twitch’s recent actions are anything to go by, they probably aren’t going to be passing the savings along to their creators, but this is still a win for you, the viewer and actually creators brace yourself, because things are about to get a little technical. The general consumer might think of video image quality in terms of resolution. You know 4K is better than 1080p, which is better than 720p, which is better than potato, but in reality there’s another critical Factor at play bit raid at a given resolution, a lower bit rate results in a fuzzier image with blocking banding and other motion artifacts. Meanwhile, a higher bitrate clears everything up, at least until you reach a point of diminishing returns, at which point you’ll probably need to crank the resolution. Let’S look at an example: 4K subscribers on floatplane.com are going to be able to see the difference best thanks to our high quality content delivery pipeline, but hopefully everyone else will be able to follow along this h.264 game footage was captured using open broadcaster. Software looks pretty bad, doesn’t it but that’s not their fault. It was encoded at only 3 500 kilobits per second and used the default very fast CPU encoding preset.
That means it takes very little bandwidth to stream and it leaves enough CPU resources available to run your game. That’S why some twitch streamers use this option. The easiest way to fix this quality is to juice up the bit rate. Here’S that same clip at 8, 000 kilobits per.
Second, that’s a lot better. So why doesn’t everybody just do this? It’S because, even if you have a great internet connection, the bandwidth required on twitch’s side would cost too much. So only partners are allowed to stream. At this level of quality, or are they the very fast x264 encoding preset cuts a lot of Corners to save on CPU Cycles? But if you happen to have a roided out, threadripper rig or a separate streaming PC, you can absolutely choose a heavier preset. Here’S what medium looks like, instead of very fast at that same 3500, kilobit per second, that’s a huge improvement, though it does come at the cost of some CPU usage, because that’s the thing it turns out, it takes a lot more computing power to preserve this much Image quality at the same bit rate bringing us back then to why we like Hardware encoders so much the nvank encoder that Nvidia includes on their modern gpus, manages to look nearly as good as the medium preset and under normal circumstances. It only has a negligible impact on your gaming experience, so we’re all good then right.
Well, no we’re not. This still looks like hot garbage compared to the original uncompressed. Video RTX 4000 might improve matters here. But, as I mentioned before, it starts at 900 and besides you’re a gamer, you already have a GPU, don’t you that is where Intel’s Arc A380 comes in. It features both av-1 decoding and encoding, meaning that it will accelerate both playback and creation of av1 media with very low CPU usage, and all you need to get one is 140 bucks, we’re gon na, have it linked down below and a pcie slot that you’re, probably Not using anyway, I mean it feels kind of wild to be going back to the co-processor days. Doesn’T it, but here we are, let’s take a look at the results at 8, 000 kilobit per second, the Improvement, if any is actually pretty hard to spot. So you twitch Partners out there probably won’t be lining up to purchase an rk380, but what about the rest of us if I’m on a lower speed connection – and I want to stream at 3 500 kilobit per second – that is a night and day difference next to Our original x264 fast preset and it’s even a market Improvement compared to medium and nvank the real mind blower in our results, though, is that after a pixel peeping session from our production manager, Edsel he’s found that av1 at 3, 500 kilobit per second looked almost as Good as our other encoders at 6, 000 kilobit per second, it’s worth noting that h.265 looked as good or maybe even better than av1, but you can only stream using codecs that a platform supports and given the cost, that’s never going to happen. We also weren’t the only ones to be so impressed. We encountered some anomalous results using Netflix’s image comparison tool, vmaf, but streaming Guru, epos, Vox, managed to get it to play nicely and found that Intel’s av1 encoder not only outperformed every other encoder on the market. At 3500, kilobit per second by a wide margin, but also managed to get surprisingly close to a score of 90 at 8, 000 kilobit per second, which should be nearly indistinguishable from The Source.
Thanks for sharing your graphs at you by the way, I probably owe you a Creator edition of the LTT screwdriver for the rest of you. You can get it at ltdstore.com. Speaking of creators, your art card has practical uses Beyond gaming as as well remember when I mentioned the Apple M1 chip. Well, it’s excellent timeline, performance and Final Cut is at least partly thanks to its Hardware decoding for popular codecs, including prores, and with an arc GPU.
We can expect the same kinds of boosts on av1 video, editing timelines. Eventually, we hope officially, today, DaVinci, Resolve and Adobe Premiere. Both support, av-1 but Da Vinci had some weird preview window.
Behavior and adobe’s implementation well didn’t seem to work for us at all. Handbrake supports it, though, for my encoding, nerd friends out there and the obvious benefit for you. All aside from everything we’ve talked about so far, is that file sizes for your locally stored media libraries can be much smaller, pretty cool.
But it’s worth mentioning that a lot of what we’re saying is forward-looking and there are drawbacks to this co-processor approach, drawbacks that led to the computer industry abandoning it many many years ago. An extra card in your system means an increase power, consumption, heat and probably noise, and while Intel has squashed most of the bugs that we documented when Arc debuted, we did still run into some issues. This card only worked in a specific slot on our motherboard and if we dared to plug a monitor into our integrated GPU, while the art card was installed, the system would blue screen almost immediately. The av-1 codec itself is also far from beginner friendly. Take a look at how verbose these configuration settings are and that’ll give you some idea now. A bit of this learning curve can be attributed to the fact that it’s still early days for the av-1 codec and the communities that will use it haven’t gotten around to experimenting with all these buttons and dials and sharing their findings online.
We also don’t know how well Intel’s implementation of av1 will hold up compared to the competition. We’Re gon na have to look at them side by side, but at the time of writing all of our 4000 series cards are tied up in the lab and amd’s rx7000s. Haven’T even arrived yet, but take a step back and look at the big picture, regardless of how well these new gpus handle.
Av1 140 bucks for an A380 is going to be a cheaper option and if the upcoming A310 ends up hitting retail instead of being OEM, only it could end up being 30 to 40 dollars cheaper than this, with the same encode and decode capabilities. As a bonus, all Arc cards support DisplayPort 2.0 uhbr10, though I don’t know that I would actually hook that next-gen high refresh rate monitor up to this particular card. It’S just a nice to have if you want to use one for Content creation Bottom Line.
This is a novel solution for tomorrow’s problem today, but I’m not out here selling your Arc gpus. You don’t need to freak out if you don’t have Hardware av1 support just yet, because you can always lean on your CPU for that, especially on the desktop fun fact. By the way YouTube has already rolled it out, if you want to try, it and platforms like twitch are sure to follow suit once they finish work on their implementations. Just like I’m finished implementing this message from our sponsor, I fix it.
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It’S like a children’s book, save yourself time and money while getting to explore a new hobby check out ifixit.com LTT to find fixed kits for your devices today. If you enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy our look at the RTX 4000 launch, where we were maybe a little too quick to write off Arc turns out. It does have at least one purpose. .