IT’S GAME CHANGING. But it’s also maybe not what *everyone* was expecting, and I need to explain
a portable form factor, I’ve been running oh so many encoder analyses like a mad scientist. So
we need a good catch phrase for this… We must go beyond… no, that’s not right. We must go where no
man has… no can’t do that either. Oh wait, it says it here. We must venture Into the Unkno- hold on.
“Hey Dave am I allowed to say this?”
“Say what?” “This thing it says on the box.
I just sent a screenshot. I’m worried Disney will
claim my video” “Oh. Hang on,
let me make some calls”
“Okay, it’s fixed” “You got Disney to approve it?”
“No, I had the box changed” “What the?”
Into the Unkow. Let’s go and unknow some things.
If you haven’t been keeping up, AV1 is a new ecosystem of media technology designed to keep
file size requirements small while being high quality enough for the needs of modern video
streaming and image-heavy websites. The entire point is to keep it open source and royalty-free,
meaning it’s cheap and easy to implement, without having to pay the exorbitant licensing fees that
have seemingly made H.265 and the upcoming H.266 dead on arrival for most consumer uses.
AV1 is supported by an organization called the “Alliance for Open Media” in which… nearly
every big name you can think of is involved. Samsung, Vimeo, Microsoft, Netflix, Mozilla, AMD,
Nvidia, Intel and Arm, Google, Facebook, Cisco, Amazon, Hulu, VideoLAN, Adobe, and hell, even
Apple. Basically EVERYONE involved in streaming media wants to cheaper, more open, and higher
quality tech to work with, which is no surprise - though some of those companies’ predisposition
for absolutely and awfully anti-consumer DRM in the past has me a bit concerned.
Our main focus here is on the video codec, which Twitch has been pushing a roadmap to introduce AV1
streaming on its platform for years, to allow for higher framerate and resolution streaming
without higher bandwidth requirements. BUT AV1 also has tools for metadata and even an image
format that could replace the HEIF format such as what’s used in iPhones. The only limiting
factor right now seems to be the actual protocol to stream AV1 video, as RTMP doesn’t work for it.
I’ve covered decoding AV1 in depth all over the channel the past few years. I’ll have a playlist
linked below if you wanna catch up. Hardware decoders were added in Nvidia’s 3000 series GPUs,
AMD’s RX6000 series GPUs, and Intel’s most recent rounds of iGPUs. Plus tons
of little mobile devices, TVs, and even game consoles going back to the PS4 Pro
can play AV1 video now. And if hardware decoders aren’t available, it’s honestly
fine to decode on your CPU as long as you’re not watching 8K 60FPS or something. It was
also recently shown that Netflix utilizes a very cool feature of AV1 - of which there are probably
tons, we just haven’t discovered them all yet - called “Grain Synthesis” which allows the encoder
to analyze film grain, remove it to compress, and then bring it back during decode. This is
something that helps preserve quality while also still preserving the original artist’s intentions,
and I hope YouTube’s pipeline will use this feature as well.
AV1 videos are everywhere on YouTube now. Previously reserved for only high traffic videos,
and few ones at that, ever since ramping up new hush hush AV1 encoding hardware in their
datacenters, based on spot checking, I’d wager more than half of the videos I watch on a daily
basis play back in AV1 for me. You just have to tell YouTube you prefer it in the playback
settings. AV1 files also process incredibly quickly if you upload in the codec, as well.
The only downside to AV1, as is always the case with new, high-quality encoders - INCLUDING when
H.264 was first introduced after everyone just got caught up on encoding MPEG-2 at reasonable
speeds - is that it is FAR slower to encode. Realtime 1080p60 encoding wasn’t even possible
until just recently, but it’s improving at a rapid pace. It seems like AV1 development is moving far
far more quickly than any other previous codec has taken over, given we’ve had H.264 dominating for
like 15 years or more now. But it’s improving. I demo’d the CPU AV1 encoders that OBS introduced
in a past update, and they were tough to encode, but the results were promising.
The next step is, of course, GPU encoders. Encoding video on your graphics card has
taken over the independent content creator industry, allowing much higher quality and
performance to be had while streaming or making videos, without needing to reach
for crazy CPUs like Threadrippers. Nvidia was the first to really do it super well,
AMD is slowly catching up as I covered in the last video, and Intel’s iGPU-based encoder on their
CPUs is now out-performing everyone. But with their debut of their first dedicated graphics card
in 24 years, they launched with the first consumer hardware AV1 encoder onboard, too.
Let’s see how it stacks up. Yes, it’s graph time. I’m getting better!
Before we get to all the nerdy data, check this out. I spent way too long on this.
The new Backing Track album is legit. We now have a trio of great synth-themed albums after you all
have been requesting it for over a year now! We have a lot of juicy synth goodness for you.
Go stream it, use it in your videos, it’s in this one. Enjoy.
I don’t know how to say this… but holy balls CPU encoding is just pointless
now. These results are incredible. But you’d be forgiven for looking at specific samples
and not being impressed at first. Lets walk through the graphs.
Be patient, as the results at play here have HUGE implications for the future.
These graphs show each of the GPU encoder’s best results, per my last video about the AMF encoder
update with updated comparisons, versus X264 on VerySlow, the CPU SVT-AV1 encoder, and Intel’s GPU
AV1 encoder. I chose VerySlow because it’s kind of the unobtanium benchmark of “dream quality” for
many, and it’s near impossible to run in realtime due to the specific options it uses. Placebo is
the only next step beyond it for X264, and it definitely can’t be run realtime and sometimes
scores marginally lower than VerySlow anyway. This data is measured using Netflix’s VMAF quality
analysis framework, I detailed it in the previous video, but basically it compares to a completely
uncompressed lossless sample of video and measures how a viewer would perceive quality on a scale of
0 to 100 with 100 being a perfect match. I tested a variety of games at 3 different bitrates,
3.5mbps, 6mbps, and 8mbps, to evaluate the scenarios of common bitrate-limited game
streaming. I’m only showing the FPS genre here as it best illustrates differences and I still
have a massive amount of data to drop later in the year so I’d rather just get you useful data now.
I didn’t go lower than 3.5mbps because 1080p shouldn’t be used at that low of
a bitrate - at least not with traditional H.264 encoding - and didn’t go higher than 8
because Twitch doesn’t support that and the differences become less important at that
point anyway. YouTube re-encodes your streams, so differences matter even less over there.
As a refresher, AMD’s AMF encoder received some minor updates recently,
which you the user can’t actually use yet, but it’s still in last place for overall quality.
Nvidia Nvenc performs about 2-5% better depending on bitrate, but Intel’s QuickSync
H.264 on the 12th generation CPUs outperforms both by a fair bit, which was quite surprising.
Well, at 6 and 8mbps, X264 VerySlow still outperforms all of these GPU H.264 encoders
a fair bit. Not enough to get stuck down an expensive rabbit hole trying to achieve it only
to realize you can’t encode it in real-time, but still a decent quality bump. In the low-bitrate
3.5mbps scenario, X264 VerySlow really shines by squeezing the best quality out of every bit.
But lets add AV1 to the mix. Here’s Intel’s GPU AV1 encoder. At 6 and 8mbps
it regularly trades blows with X264 VerySlow in terms of quality - which
is impressive enough for a GPU video encoder, this doesn’t normally happen,
but isn’t THAT big a leap in quality. It’s still an improvement at these higher bitrates,
but it would be understandable if you weren’t all that impressed.
But let’s zoom out and include 3.5mbps.
Holy. Freaking. Balls, Batman. At 1080p60 and only 3.5mbps - a bitrate that is typically a
blocky mess in H.264 in most encoders - Intel’s AV1 encoder just RUNS AWAY WITH THE BALL here,
blowing everything out of the water. These scores are INSANE.
It gets even more wild when you look more closely and see that Intel AV1 at 3.5mbps looks better
than most GPU H.264 encoders do at SIX megabits per second. So given QuickSync
isn’t as popular for streams as NVENC or AMF right now, effectively this little GPU
produces better quality streams than the majority of streams on Twitch,
at nearly HALF the bitrate! I cannot understate how remarkable this is.
You, the streamer, could save tons on bandwidth, or just pump out better quality.
The viewer could save on bandwidth. The whole “mobile can’t watch high bitrate
twitch streams” thing would be a nonissue when you can still achieve decent quality
at a low bitrate. It would save Twitch and Amazon money at scale. Plus you could upload
MUCH MUCH smaller videos to YouTube without sacrificing quality - actually you can do
this right now. If all goes well, this video was uploaded in AV1. This is unbelievable.
And… it’s just the tip of the iceberg. If I slot on
the CPU-only SVT-AV1 encoder, things get weirder.
So SVT-AV1 has different “presets” much like X264’s CPU usage presets like Slow, Medium,
and so on. These are numbered where the smaller number is harder to run, but higher quality.
In my previous testing with this encoder in OBS, most CPUs would realistically only be
able to run preset 7 or higher. So here’s 7 and 8 - presets that would still be tough to run, but
theoretically feasible and not unfair to compare to X264 VerySlow in terms of realistic uses. Both
of these are mostly marginal from each other, but still a BIG leap above X264 VerySlow and Intel’s
AV1 encoder at 6 and 8mbps, and then a pretty MASSIVE jump over everything else at 3.5mbps.
Much like how X264 VerySlow is a leap over GPU encoders despite still running H.264 as
a codec the same as the others, there will always be differences between the best of
what an encoder can offer when developed for CPU encoding and to not run in real-time,
and what GPU real-time encoders can do, BUT consider this context:
This is the FIRST generation of GPU AV1 encoders. I showed in my big 2020 encoder analysis round-up
just how much some GPU H.264 encoders were able to improve in hardware generations,
and last video talked about how software changes can add some minor quality improvements, too.
This is just the beginning, AND this is only the literal first GPU to have AV1 encoding support
at all. It’s theoretically possible that Nvidia - or maybe AMD, though I have less faith there,
all things considered - will have higher quality output from their AV1 encoder on RTX 4000…
whenever they decide to finally release those cards. So as impressive as these results are,
it’s going to just get better and better. And it’s already in such a good starting place.
Every time I do these encoder analyses, I get asked for my raw samples for you to pixel peep
yourself - since YouTube compression kinda messes with it and all. But that’s super expensive and
tedious to set up, so I do make it available, but exclusively for my Nebula subscribers. Nebula is a
creator-owned video streaming site where my videos are higher quality, ad-free, and I provide lots of
exclusive content or downloads that you don’t want to miss out on. I have all the video samples and
raw data from VMAF analysis available exclusively over there if you wanna get downloading.
To sign up for Nebula, the best way is with our bundle with Curiosity Stream. That’s another great
video site with tons of documentaries and other edutainment content and the bundle gets you both
sites for just $14.79 for a YEAR of great content. Nebula’s included free. So less than $15 for a
year of awesome content, exclusive content from myself and many other awesome creators on Nebula
such as LowSpecGamer, Thomas Frank, and Rene Ritche. Sign up for the best deal in streaming and
support hardcore testing and documentation like this at CuriosityStream.com/Epos.
I really hope Twitch starts experimenting with AV1 source streams being made available, and that
YouTube continues to ramp up the AV1 availability for videos. The future for AV1 video is bright. I
hate feeling like I’m just puffing hot air for a new product or something, and the reality is
you probably won’t be able to get your hands on an A380 anytime soon - but when they do drop, their
low price and low power draw, plus this encoder will make it an incredible streaming PC GPU in a
way that Nvidia and AMD just can’t compete with right now. BUT this encoder is just phenomenal.
Especially because the card DOES still have Intel’s QuickSync H.264
and HEVC encoders on board, too! It’s not just limited to AV1,
of course. I’m not sure why these new GPUs aren’t implementing hardware VP9 encoders from
any of the 3 companies, but AV1 is about to make that a non-issue.
Based on the limited testing I’ve been able to do, the A380’s H.264 encoder seems to be on par
with the 12900k’s Quick Sync, I would imagine they’re the same, but due to some Handbrake
issues right now I can’t get full data on it. Hopefully within the next couple weeks,
as I’d also like to see if Hyper Encode - the ability to have the dGPU and iGPU encoding
alternating frames or groups of frames to speed up encode time - has an impact on quality, too!
There’s a lot to cover with this little GPU. I still want to take an in-depth
look at their “Smooth Sync” screen tearing hider,
I want to see how it plays in a system with another GPU, and more. Plus on the AV1 side,
I kinda want to see how the still image codec compares to the standard JPEG and new
WEBP compression. Comment below if you want to see that. Join us on Discord to chat about this and
get help with your stream. Otherwise, I’m your Stream Professor and remember be kind, rewind.