Ryzen is THE BEST CPU for Game Streaming? - $h!t Manufacturers Say Ep. 2
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,563 words · ~7 min read
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x264 quicksync video nvnc
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vce there is no shortage of ways to
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transform your screen into a video stream visible to potentially millions
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of people around the world for the Mad
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Ballers Among Us a second PC dedicated
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to that task is the Undisputed king of
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performance and quality but how do the
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rest of us get our streams going without
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Crossing them up AMD claims to have the
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best solution but do they welcome to a new
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episode of Manufacturers
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say browse privately and securely with
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tunnel bear for free at the link in the video
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description one of AMD's top marketing points is that the 16 threads in their
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ryzen 7 CPUs allow Gamers to dedicate
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ample CPU resources to both gaming and
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video streaming coding without impacting the performance of either since games
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won't make use of all 16 threads and
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neither will an coder meanwhile one of
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Intel selling points for their consumer level chips is their integrated graphics
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processor and its ability to use
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quicksync video technology to encode a
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video stream without impacting the performance of their
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CPU well that all sounds great but with
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both of them claiming to achieve the same objective by very different means
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well surely one of them's got to be better right well predictably enough AMD
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says that their way software encoding is
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superior and the traditional wisdom
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would back them up on this one the software-based
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x264 encoder is well known to offer
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higher image quality and more flexibility in its setup compared to
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other Solutions but until now if you
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cared about performance you'd almost never use it while gaming because its
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consumption of system resources was pretty much guaranteed to impact your
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gameplay unless you were running an extreme Edition or something like that
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but with more processing cores at ryzen 7's disposal it could be that AMD is on
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to something meanwhile what are the
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other guys doing different here Intel's Quicks sync video and for that matter
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NVIDIA's nvnc and rtgs radon video codec
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engine are all what are known as dedicated hardware-based encoders which
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present an interesting conundrum in theory you actually stand to lose
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virtually no performance which is cool
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but you're forced to use the optimized
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settings that are baked into the hardware meaning that you can't really
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tune anything beyond their presets besides simply increasing the raw bit
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rate to improve quality so finally back
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to the big questions how much does the encoder matter for quality is twitch's
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new maximum of 6 megabits per second enough that it won't really matter
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anymore are any of these Solutions
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really able to untether you from the second PC and let you stream without
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impacting performance well we touched on this from
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AMD's perspective in our ryzen 7 review
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which you can check out here and we asked you guys at that time if you
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wanted something more in depth and since you did ask so nicely your wish is our
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Command we're going to focus on two games for our testing first ashes of the
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singularities CPU Benchmark not because it's a hot game on Twitch right now but
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for technical reasons it stresses the CPU and has a good mix of slow moving
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terrain with lots of small fast-moving projectiles that are great at
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introducing blocky artifact during encoding the second will be the for
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Honor Benchmark with its sweeping cameras and loads of special effects we
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know again most people aren't streaming
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these games but canned benches are much more repeatable across our platforms and
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both of these titles represent a realistic gaming load that is more
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demanding than today's popular Esports titles for our encoders we've used
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common Twitch streaming bit rates and resolutions for all of our comparisons
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you'll note that 1080p30 is technically
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more data to cram into our lower bit rates than 720p60 but the higher frame
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rate of 720p60 should better highlight
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motion artifacts in our encoders so any CPU even one with
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onboard Graphics can use x264 encoding
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but we observed in our testing that not all are created equal in this regard we
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found that AMD's ryzen 7 managed to oh excuse
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me just snuck up on me managed to avoid
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dropping frames throughout our testing at a higher quality preset than either
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of Team Blues Solutions in some cases
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even some of our hardware encoders needed lower presets so to find out how
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these differences in encoding settings affect real world image quality we
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captured a lossless reference recording
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with our Blackmagic intensity Pro and used it for comparison so we can see
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some subtle differences here ryzen manages to retain smaller details that
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get smeared out on team blue at their very fast and super fast settings
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compared to ryzen's faster this not only
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translates into better picture quality overall but also contributes to better
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quality when twitch then re-encodes it
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for its various quality options moving on here we see our Hardware encoders at
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1080 30p at 2500 kilobit per second
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alongside our ryzen x264 footage of the
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four x264 on ryzen appears to be the least likely to lose small projectiles
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in ashes of The Benchmark nvnc and
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quicksync don't seem half bad here to be clear but they do block up more often
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and lose finer details when A lot's going on at once rtgs AMF encoder on the
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other hand sorry radon fans but
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uh things get more interesting again at
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720p60 x264 holds up best once more although
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the shimmering of compression artifacts on the cobblestones as the camera flies
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by is pretty noticeable but not nearly as noticeable as it is with the rest of
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our contest nvnc is again at the head of the
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hardware pack looking decent but our
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quick sync and AMF footage are both abysmal at times blocking up so badly as
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to appear as though they'd been recorded at 240p instead of
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720p we'll keep our visual comparisons rolling while we move on to Performance
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with x264 we see a respectable showing
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from our ryzen 7 1800x at averaging
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about a 5 to 10% performance penalty on
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the faster and very fast presets over
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our Baseline reading on the 6900k
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meanwhile we get an average of a roughly 3 to
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23% Performance drop clearly a much more
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varied result while our 7700k could get
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as high as a 36% hit both of these ones on the super
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fast preset AMD high-speed Infinity
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fabric interconnect secret sauce for ryzen's video encoding while gaming
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performance looks like it's working so
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far our Hardware tests meanwhile show
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ryzen actually taking a wider hit with nvenc at roughly 5 to 15% on average
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while our 6900k managed a 3 to 10%
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variance and our 7700k ranged from 2 to
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18% rg's AMF encoder seemed to hit all
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of our chips less with ryzen taking a
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roughly 7 to 8% performance hit and sitting in between the other two though
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as we've seen the AMF encoder is also far from the highest quality for
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streaming but we have one final encoder
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one that we can't directly compare with any other CPU and that's Intel's
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quicksync video compared to the 7700k
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Baseline it caused a 3 to 12% performance drop about in line with the
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rest of our Hardware encoders so finally then lining all our encoders up next to
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each other we can see that actually
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ryzen running x264 blows the doors off every other CPU
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encoder combination it has a tight
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variation in its performance impact over our Baseline numbers and it has a higher
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quality CPU preset meaning that when twitch re-encodes you lose less detail
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overall so taken together it looks like
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AMD's marketing department wasn't asleep
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required then use offer code LT to save
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10% so thanks for watching guys dislike if you disliked leave a like though if
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you liked it and get subscribed and maybe check out where to buy the stuff
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store as well as our community Forum which you should totally join