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 gonna 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 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 of emath 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 Addie 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 well remember when I mentioned
the Apple M1 chip well its 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
DaVinci 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 gonna 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 iFixit is here to help
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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