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foreign

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is an amazing amazing video coding

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format it's faster it's got better quality and it's going to be everywhere

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in a few short years I want to be an

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early adopter of av1 but my GPU

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doesn't support it and NVIDIA's RTX 40

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series is so expensive that it feels completely out of reach and besides I

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don't even need the extra gaming performance Hey kid we got all these Arc gpus nobody

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wants they're cheap as heck and they got the good stuff from behind the wall

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maybe there is a better way to be clear I'm not suggesting that you actually buy

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an A380 for gaming but we spent the last week exploring productivity and

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streaming workloads that could easily justify adding one of these to your

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current GPU it's really really cool almost as cool as this Segway to our

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sponsor iFixit is your battery beginning to bulge looking for a new project

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iFixit has you covered stay tuned to the end of the video to learn more about

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their battery replacement kits it sounds like Madness buy a GPU only to never

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play games on it but let me explain the problem perhaps unsurprisingly is NVIDIA

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their new RTX 4000 series cards are

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staggeringly fast and come loaded with all the latest bells and whistles DLS S3

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Hardware assisted av1 encoding and decoding except they start at 900 US

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dollars meaning that until AMD's rx7000

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cards may be ride in and save the day almost no one can afford to go next gen

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bringing us to our unconventional proposal adding an arc GPU to your

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existing setup isn't going to close the gap in terms of gaming performance but

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what it can do is modernize the features that your PC supports enabling you to

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get the most out of Next Generation DisplayPort 2.0 monitors and more

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importantly properly handle av1 media now I know I know Hardware support for

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media codex isn't the sexiest topic but

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imagine a world without it if your phone had to use its general purpose CPU

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course for video decoding you might get an hour maybe two hours of screen time

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watching YouTube videos not that you'd want to hold it in your hand for that

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long and without Hardware accelerated encoding your M1 MacBook Air could

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easily take 30 minutes to export a video rather than three the difference in both

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power efficiency and performance really is that Stark which raises the question

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why don't we use Hardware acceleration for everything ah I'm glad you asked all

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other things being equal the cost of a microprocessor is proportional to its

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physical size and while fixed function Hardware like a media decoder or encoder

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is really great at that one thing it is

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basically useless for anything else and

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it adds cost to every single chip so

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unless you are darn sure that every customer is going to use it you'd

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probably be better off leaving out that fixed function hardware and beefing up

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your more versatile general purpose processing course all of which means

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that given that NVIDIA AMD and Intel are

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all on board av1 must be a pretty big

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deal it is if you use the internet you will eventually benefit from av1 even if

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you don't realize it that's because the biggest users of av1 are going to be

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Mega corporations like Amazon Disney and Google how do I know because it's going

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to save them a lot of money to start with av1 is entirely open source and

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royalty free making it super cheap to implement at scale the ubiquitous h.264

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codec has been outdated for a long time but the reason we're still stuck with it

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is because more modern Alternatives like h.265 cost operators between 20 and 120

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cents per device which for our company with as many users as twitch adds up

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pretty fast of course if twitch's recent actions are anything to go by they

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probably aren't going to be passing the savings along to their creators but this

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is still a win for you the viewer and actually creators brace yourself because

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things are about to get a little technical the general consumer might

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think of video image quality in terms of resolution you know 4K is better than

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1080p which is better than 720p which is better than potato but in reality

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there's another critical Factor at play bit raid at a given resolution a lower

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bit rate results in a fuzzier image with blocking banding and other motion

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artifacts meanwhile a higher bitrate clears everything up at least until you

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reach a point of diminishing returns at which point you'll probably need to

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crank the resolution let's look at an example 4K subscribers on Floatplane.com

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are going to be able to see the difference best thanks to our high quality content delivery pipeline but

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hopefully everyone else will be able to follow along this h.264 game footage was

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captured using open broadcaster software looks pretty bad doesn't it but that's

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not their fault it was encoded at only 3 500 kilobits per second and used the

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default very fast CPU encoding preset that means it takes very little

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bandwidth to stream and it leaves enough CPU resources available to run your game

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that's why some twitch streamers use this option the easiest way to fix this

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quality is to juice up the bit rate here's that same clip at 8 000 kilobits

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per second that's a lot better so why

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doesn't everybody just do this it's because even if you have a great

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internet connection the bandwidth required on twitch's side would cost too

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much so only partners are allowed to stream at this level of quality or are

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they the very fast x264 encoding preset

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cuts a lot of Corners to save on CPU Cycles but if you happen to have a

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roided out threadripper rig or a separate streaming PC you can absolutely

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choose a heavier preset here's what medium looks like instead of very fast

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at that same 3500 kilobit per second that's a huge improvement though it does

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come at the cost of some CPU usage because that's the thing it turns out it

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takes a lot more computing power to preserve this much image quality at the

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same bit rate bringing us back then to why we like Hardware encoders so much

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the nvank encoder that NVIDIA includes on their modern gpus manages to look

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nearly as good as the medium preset and

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under normal circumstances it only has a negligible impact on your gaming

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experience so we're all good then right well no we're not this still looks like

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hot garbage compared to the original uncompressed video RTX 4000 might

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improve matters here but as I mentioned before it starts at 900 and besides

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you're a gamer you already have a GPU don't you that is where Intel's Arc A380

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comes in it features both av-1 decoding

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and encoding meaning that it will accelerate both playback and creation of

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av1 media with very low CPU usage and

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all you need to get one is 140 bucks we're gonna have it linked down below

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and a PCIe slot that you're probably not using anyway I mean it feels kind of

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wild to be going back to the co-processor days doesn't it but here we

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are let's take a look at the results at 8 000 kilobit per second the Improvement

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if any is actually pretty hard to spot so you twitch Partners out there

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probably won't be lining up to purchase an rk380 but what about the rest of us

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if I'm on a lower speed connection and I want to stream at 3 500 kilobit per

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second that is a night and day difference next to our original x264

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fast preset and it's even a market Improvement compared to medium and nvank

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the real mind blower in our results though is that after a pixel peeping

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session from our production manager Edsel he found that av1 at 3 500 kilobit

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per second looked almost as good as our other encoders at 6 000 kilobit per

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second it's worth noting that h.265 looked as good or maybe even better than

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av1 but you can only stream using codecs

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that a platform supports and given the

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cost that's never going to happen we also weren't the only ones to be so

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impressed we encountered some anomalous results using Netflix's image comparison

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tool of emath but streaming Guru epos Vox managed to get it to play nicely and

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found that Intel's av1 encoder not only outperformed every other encoder on the

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market at 3500 kilobit per second by a wide margin but also managed to get

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surprisingly close to a score of 90 at 8

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000 kilobit per second which should be nearly indistinguishable from The Source

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thanks for sharing your graphs Addie by the way I probably owe you a Creator edition of the LTT screwdriver for the

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rest of you you can get it at ltdstore.com speaking of creators your

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art card has practical uses Beyond gaming as well remember when I mentioned

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the Apple M1 chip well its excellent timeline performance and Final Cut is at

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least partly thanks to its Hardware decoding for popular codecs including

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prores and with an arc GPU we can expect

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the same kinds of boosts on av1 video editing timelines eventually we hope

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officially today DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere both support av-1 but

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DaVinci had some weird preview window behavior and adobe's implementation well

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didn't seem to work for us at all handbrake supports it though for my

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encoding nerd friends out there and the obvious benefit for you all aside from

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everything we've talked about so far is that file sizes for your locally stored

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media libraries can be much smaller pretty cool but it's worth mentioning

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that a lot of what we're saying is forward-looking and there are drawbacks

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to this co-processor approach drawbacks that led to the computer industry

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abandoning it many many years ago an extra card in your system means an

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increase power consumption heat and probably noise and while Intel has

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squashed most of the bugs that we documented when Arc debuted we did still

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run into some issues this card only worked in a specific slot on our

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motherboard and if we dared to plug a monitor into our integrated GPU while

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the art card was installed the system would blue screen almost immediately the

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av-1 codec itself is also far from beginner friendly take a look at how

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verbose these configuration settings are and that'll give you some idea now a bit

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of this learning curve can be attributed to the fact that it's still early days

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for the av-1 codec and the communities that will use it haven't gotten around

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to experimenting with all these buttons and dials and sharing their findings

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online we also don't know how well Intel's implementation of av1 will hold

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up compared to the competition we're gonna have to look at them side by side

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but at the time of writing all of our 4000 series cards are tied up in the lab

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and AMD's rx7000s haven't even arrived

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yet but take a step back and look at the big picture regardless of how well these new gpus

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handle av1 140 bucks for an A380 is

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going to be a cheaper option and if the upcoming A310 ends up hitting retail

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instead of being OEM only it could end up being 30 to 40 dollars cheaper than

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this with the same encode and decode capabilities as a bonus all Arc cards

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support DisplayPort 2.0 uhbr10 though I

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don't know that I would actually hook that next-gen high refresh rate monitor

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up to this particular card it's just a nice to have if you want to use one for

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Content creation Bottom Line This is a novel solution for tomorrow's problem

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today but I'm not out here selling your

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Arc gpus you don't need to freak out if

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you don't have Hardware av1 support just yet because you can always lean on your

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CPU for that especially on the desktop fun fact by the way YouTube has already

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rolled it out if you want to try it and platforms like twitch are sure to follow

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suit once they finish work on their implementations just like I'm finished

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implementing this message from our sponsor I fix it iFixit is here to help

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expansive range of battery replacement kits for your devices they have kits for

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laptops cell phones tablets smart watches and even Nintendo switches is it

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your first time repairing a device don't worry each kit has a simple to follow

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step-by-step guide with photos to walk you through the process it's like a

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children's book save yourself time and money while getting to explore a new

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hobby check out ifixit.com LTT to find

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fixed kits for your devices today if you enjoyed this video you might also enjoy

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our look at the RTX 4000 launch where we

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were maybe a little too quick to write off Arc turns out it does have at least

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one purpose