My CPU is an AMD 5600X. My test video is 1080p 30fps, I’m trying to bring it down to 480p using AV1.
This is my first time playing with AV1. I bought an A310 to play around with because I read that the hardware encoder was faster than software, albeit lower quality and slightly larger.
Quality isn’t important to me, I have 700gb of 480i video that was saved at 1080p and inefficiently encoded, I want to reduce its size dramatically.
I’m using handbrake on Windows, and I chose AV1 SVT at first, and I average about 150fps, sometimes 120 sometimes 180. My CPU sits at 100%.
But if I choose AV1 Intel QSV, I average only about 40fps. And the GPU sits at 68%.
What am I missing? Thanks in advance
Edit: I found a thread from a year ago saying that encoding performance dropped after driver 4887, so I rolled way way back to 4885 from October 2023, and my performance almost doubled to 70-80 fps. But this is still far worse than SVT on CPU alone.
I read about a bug where the whole card can only be utilized if running two jobs simultaneously, so I tried this. The second job runs much slower, about 10-20fps. But that does bring me closer to 90-100fps combined, sometimes 🤷♂️
Something has got to be wrong, or maybe I’m expecting too much performance for the job I’m doing? I don’t have any special filters set up. You’d think encoding 1080 to 480 would be lightning fast.
not really experienced - but is there a memory read limit somewhere? if your gpu is not able to read fast enough or write fast enough this would result in lower usage (68%). I think with intel cards, you have to enable
Also encoding being slower than CPU is possible (there is a possibility there are not just enough units on the card to the encode) but in this case, it seems much lower, possibly power limited?
Thanks for the suggestions!
Hmmm, I’d think a memory r/w limit would affect CPU encoding too? The files are reading from and writing to the same high speed nvme drive, 7Gb/s read, 5Gb/s write.
Maybe the slot it’s in is only 1x for some reason? I’m pretty sure it’s an 8x slot, and the a310 only needs 4x. I can look into it.
Power limited, hard to say. It’s a 75w card that gets all it’s juice from the pcie slot, no plugs on it. My motherboard has all its plugs plugged in 🤔
Thanks for the suggestions! And good to know that it seems weird to you too, maybe I’m not crazy then haha
no, i think cpus are allowed to access all of memory, where gpus (dependingon config) have to to ask for memory via cpu in chunks of 500MiB to GiB
also, maybe check motherboard setting for this power curves
Your problem is using Intel QSV.
Nothing you or sga have said so far is really relevant.
Intel QSV is an encoding method designed to work on Intel CPUs, running integrated graphics, meaning that it either entirely doesn’t or barely uses your GPU at all, because its designed for a computer that doesn’t have a GPU.
Please see my other comment.