(rock thunking) (lighthearted music)
- On the other side of this wall is an amazing,
amazing video coding format.
It's faster,
it's got better quality,
and it's gonna 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 segue to our sponsor.
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- 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,
DLSS3, hardware-assisted AV1 encoding and decoding,
except they start at 900 US dollars,
meaning that until AMD's RX 7000 cards maybe ride in
and save the day, almost no one can afford
to go next-gen, brings us to our unconventional proposal.
Adding an Arc GPU to your existing setup isn't gonna 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 codecs isn't the sexiest topic,
but imagine a world without it.
If your phone has to use its general-purpose CPU cores
for video decoding, you might get an hour,
maybe two hours, of screen time watching YouTube videos,
not that you'd wanna 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 using 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 gonna use it,
you'd probably be better off leaving out
that fixed function hardware and beefing up your
more versatile general-purpose processing cores,
all of which means that, given that Nvidia,
AMD, and Intel are all onboard,
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 gonna be megacorporations like Amazon,
Disney, and Google.
How do I know?
Because it's gonna 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 a 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 gonna 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 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, bitrate.
At a given resolution, a lower bitrate results
in a fuzzier image with blocking,
bending, 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 probably need to crank the resolution.
Let's look at an example.
4K subscribers on floatplane.com are gonna 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 streamer use this option.
The easiest way to fix this quality is
to juice up the bitrate.
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 3,500 kilobit per second.
That's a huge improvement, though it (coughs) does come
at the cost of some CPU usage, 'cause that's the thing.
It turns out it takes a lot more computing power
to preserve this much image quality at the same bitrate,
bringing us back, then,
to why we like hardware encoders so much.
The NVENC 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 AV1 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 kinda wild to be going back
to the coprocessor days, doesn't it?
But here we are.
Let's take a look at the results.
At 8,000 kilobit per seconds, 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 Arc A380.
But what about the rest of us?
If I'm on a lower-speed connection
and I wanna 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 marked improvement compared
to Medium and NVENC.
The real mind-blower in our results, though,
is that, after a pixel-peeping session
from our production manager, Edzel,
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 gonna 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 EposVox managed
to get it to play nicely
and found that Intel's AV1 encoder
not only outperformed every other encoder
on the market at 3,500 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 Eddie, by the way,
I probably owe you a Creator Edition of the LTT screwdriver.
For the rest of you, you can get it at lttstore.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 in 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 Premier both support AV1,
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 nerds 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 coprocessor approach,
drawbacks that led to the computer industry
abandoning it many, many years ago.
An extra card in your system means
an increase in 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 Arc card was installed,
the system would blue screen almost immediately.
The AV1 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 AV1 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 RX 7000s 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 gonna 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 UHBR 10,
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 wanna use one for content creation.
Bottom line, this is a novel solution
for tomorrow's problem today,
but I'm not out here selling ya 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 wanna try it
and platforms like Twitch are sure to follow suit
once they finish work on their implementations.
Just like I'm finished implementing
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- If you enjoyed this video you might also enjoy
our look at the RTX 4000 launch
where we were maybe a little to quick to write off art.
Turns out it does have at least one purpose.