The performance of the AV1 encoder of ARC A380 is very good

by ·

Recently, it has been reported that the Intel Arc brand Alchemist (DG2) discrete graphics card has encountered a series of troubles, and the desktop platform so far only has the entry-level A380. Although this entry-level graphics card has limited performance, its Xe media engine supports AV1 encoding, which is not available on previous Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

Recently, the Youtube channel EposVox used ARC A380 to test its AV1 encoder, which shows that the comparison is more outstanding than the H.264 encoder of NVIDIA and AMD.

EposVox said that in recent years, more streaming media platforms have begun to adopt the AV1 format. Although many GPUs currently support AV1 decoding, if you want to make videos in AV1 format, you can only use software instead of higher hardware. Intel’s Xe-HPG architecture is mainly for game applications, but the Xe media engine for video hard encoding and decoding has been further enhanced on the previous Xe-LP architecture and can support hardware encoding and decoding in VP9, ​​AVC, HEVC, and AV1 formats.

EposVox placed Intel’s AV1 encoder and tested it against multiple H.264 encoders, including AMD’s AMF, Intel’s Quick Sync, Nvidia’s NVENC, and software options in streaming packages such as OBS. Tested at 3.5 Mbps, 6 Mbps, and 8 Mbps with Netflix’s VMAF benchmark tool to compare video quality.

The results show that the performance of the AV1 encoder of ARC A380 is very good, and the performance of 3.5 Mbps is even comparable to the performance of NVIDIA and AMD at 6 Mbps. This means that less bandwidth is required to see the same quality video, reducing the bandwidth on the network. Rumor has it that Nvidia’s new generation of GPUs based on the Ada Lovelace architecture will also incorporate the AV1 encoder, and AMD’s RDNA 3 architecture seems to be doing the same.

Tags: