Intel Arc AV1 Encoder Quickly Beats AMD and Nvidia H.264 | Tom’s Hardware
AV1 encoding has eventually designed its way to the public through integration with Intel’s new…
AV1 encoding has eventually designed its way to the public through integration with Intel’s new Arc Alchemist GPUs — the initially GPUs to attribute this know-how. In accordance to a new movie by EposVox, this new encoder has been analyzed on an Arc A380 and provides outstanding effectiveness for very low-bit-fee movie streaming, dominating every single H.264 hardware encoder in existence — such as Nvidia’s tried and correct NVENC encoder.
AV1 is an open up-supply, royalty-totally free movie coding format formulated by the Alliance for Open up Media, a consortium launched in 2015. AV1 is a totally free, state-of-the-art codec that everyone can use on the net. AV1 provides massively much better compression overall performance with up to 50 per cent more compact file measurements as opposed to H.264.
AV1 has acquired key traction in the movie streaming industry in current many years — AV1 decoding engines by now supported in a lot of of the most recent graphics engines, which include Nvidia’s RTX 30 sequence Ampere architecture, AMD’s RX 6000 series’ RDNA2 GPUs, and Intel’s latest integrated graphics GPUs. Even older gaming consoles, these kinds of as Sony’s PlayStation 4 Professional, support the AV1 codec.
According to EposVox, video clip streaming platforms this kind of as YouTube have also adopted AV1 extensively in latest many years — the YouTuber claims just about fifty percent the video clips he watches on a daily basis assistance the new codec.
AV1 encoding for written content producing and movie streaming has been mainly absent, inspite of AV1’s adoption. None of the most current graphics engines guidance AV1 encode engines. You can absolutely use AV1 encoding on the CPU with software program encoding, but for some motive no one has bothered to carry out a components-accelerated system of AV1 encoding. Till now, of class, with Intel primary the charge with its Arc GPUs.
Arc A380 AV1 Quality Comparison
EposVox analyzed Intel’s new AV1 encoder from a range of H.264 encoders, which includes Intel’s personal Fast Sync technology, Nvidia’s NVENC, AMD’s AMF, and software-based mostly H.264 encoders such as the a person located in OBS.
Screening was executed at 3.5 Mbps, 6 Mbps, and 8 Mbps employing Netflix’s VMAF benchmarking resource which analyses video clip top quality with a scoring process of to 100 ( is unwatchable,100 is best video clip top quality — in contrast to uncompressed online video).
The AV1 effects are spectacular: the new Intel encoder scored 83 factors at 3.5 Mbps and 90 details at 6 Mbps — the best of all the H.264 encoders at these little bit costs. (This initial illustration was taken from films recorded from Battlefield 2042.)
The Nvidia NVENC encoder — surprisingly — made 1 of the most affordable exam success: 71 details at 3.5 Mbps and 85 details at 8 Mbps. The AMD AMF encoder scored shut to Nvidia, even though Intel’s Swift Sync encoder (the Alder Lake variant) scored increased with 76 and 87 points at the very same bitrates. This tends to make Intel’s new AV1 encoder 16 p.c “better” than each the Nvidia NVENC and AMD AMF encoders.
The only H.264 encoder that came close to the AV1’s results was OBS’s x264 VerySlow H.264 software program encoder preset, which scored 78 factors at 3.5 Mbps and 88 details at 6 Mbps. These success are spectacular for the AV1 codec due to the fact OBS’s VerySlow preset is so useful resource-intensive it won’t be able to be operate in true-time (and is as a result worthless for reside streaming).
For much more aspects on the AV1 checks — including software accelerated AV1 tests — verify out EposVox’s video clip.
3.5 Mbps is the Sweet Location for AV1 Are living Streaming
The 3.5 Mbps results are where we see the most gains out of Intel’s AV1 encoder. This encoder is so fantastic at 3.5 Mbps that it was in a position to outperform both Nvidia’s and AMD’s encoders at 6 Mbps with approximately half the bitrate.
As you get into bitrates better than 6 Mbps, even so, there feel to be diminishing returns. This is specifically real of Intel’s AV1 encoder which only gains 2.2% superior impression good quality at 8 Mbps (the Twitch limit) above 6 Mbps.
As a result, we can count on bitrates to drop substantially when streaming platforms make the swap to AV1. This will be great for viewers, as the new encoder will need substantially less online bandwidth to look at videos at the same quality as H.264, and will put significantly less pressure on the world wide web as a entire.
These new AV1 codec success are incredibly amazing all round. Thanks to Intel, AV1 has completely decimated H.264 encoding with exceptional image good quality that involves drastically fewer bandwidth.
So considerably we have only observed Intel’s implementation of AV1 encoding. We must get a much better knowing of AV1’s capabilities when Nvidia and AMD carry out their individual AV1 encoding engines in their subsequent-gen GPUs. If H.264 hardware encoders have taught us anything, it’s that encoding effectiveness can transform greatly involving makes and variations.
Nvidia and AMD’s AV1 encoder implementations could be even far more successful and larger top quality than what Intel is delivering correct now — but we are going to have to wait around right until the RTX 40 sequence and RX 7000 series launch to see if that’s true.
