Intel Quick Sync, How Does It Work??

[BlockABoots]

I have a Gen 1 Intel Bloomfield i7 920 cpu overclocked to 4GHz, and will soon be upgrading to an i7 Haswell chip. As this chip will incorporate the Intel Quick Sync feature, i am wondering how this feature is enabled and how it works. Would i just encode my raw capture videos as usual with MeGUI or RipBot and Intel Quick Sync would encode them twice as fast or do i need to use specific Intel program to have the benifit of Intel Quick Sync?

[Blue_MiSfit]

QuickSync will not accelerate x264. You need to use an encoder that uses the QuickSync encoder. I have never bothered trying, but it can potentially be useful for capturing at a high bitrate where speed is much more important than quality, since you can just use a lot of bitrate to make quality good.

[Yups]

You need an encoder with Quicksync support. For example MediaEspresso or Handbrake (nightly build with QS support).

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Also you need to note that QuickSync does not provide "low level" functions that could be used to accelerate existing encoders, like x264.

QuickSync is an encoder by itself. Although, as far as I know, QuickSync is implemented partly in software and partly in hardware, it's more or less a "black box" you can use as a whole or not use at all.

This means that using the QuickSync encoder by definition means not using any other H.264 encoder, such as x264. And quality-wise, it isn't anywhere near x264.

[Yups]

You haven't seen Haswell reviews yet.

[jkauff]

QuickSync is not as good as x264, but for a quick video to put on your phone it's fine. Encoder quality improved in the current version of the Intel Media SDK, and should continue to improve over time, as Intel seems committed to further development.