Evaluation of HEVC decoders (SW, Hybrid and HW)

[NikosD]

Out of curiosity.
It's a good brand, bad luck.

Good choice in general the RX 480 card

[CruNcher]

i get the problem in madVR and in browser. so it is generally.

nothing special just bad luck.

i could work around it and do some tests but testing this card it self is just more important right now.

trust me i'm very very upset about this.

Is it only happening on Windows 10 ?

There are lot of reports since the Anniversary Update of Graphical and Stability issues with many IHV Drivers on the indtroduction of WDDM 2.1 ;)

Lot of intermediate Flip issues as well ;)

[NikosD]

XFX.

i don't know why this should matter.
Give a few more € and buy this XFX GTR 8GB RX 480 monster.

1475MHz at 64C max and TDP 133W fully overclocked.

At normal overclock speeds the temp is ~50C and TDP <90W (!)

I think GloFo has started delivering RX 480 chips with good quality.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=zWASNajSdpg

[huhn]

useless to me. i'm not really gaming with it.

[aufkrawall]

Edit: *sorry, wrong thread*

[CruNcher]

useless to me. i'm not really gaming with it.

It's not only the Gaming we rarely use the Power off the GCN Hardware yet for Video based tasks ;)

[NikosD]

Polaris RX 460 2GB/4GB is definitely faster regarding GPU power than 1050 and cheaper - the 2GB model.

For someone using MadVR for example could be a better choice or for a little on-line gaming besides HTPC.

We still don't have clear picture of HEVC decoding capability, but I'm pretty sure Polaris could play Blu-ray UHD.

8K is only for demo/benchmarks right now.

[CruNcher]

Depends on what you want todo NikosD Nvidias VPX is a shared thing which means the more Power the more Streams you could play at once or the Higher Bitrates you can achieve @ 4K ;)

[NikosD]

What do you mean a shared thing ?

Nvidia's VPx it's a fixed-fuction hardware decoder like UVD and QuickSync.

It's independent of the GPU shading power.

Only clock defines its speed for the same architecture.

[NikosD]

You are talking about samples that Pascal also can't play properly, I remember a post of a guy regarding an H.264 SD clip and a Pascal card.

I don't believe it's a hardware problem but rather a driver's issue for both companies.

[clsid]

That clip contained errors, which is why other hardware decoders were also having trouble with it.

[nussman]

Polaris has some problems with h.264 interlaced: https://community.amd.com/thread/203197
Clips with errors are bad for "all" hardware decoders ...

[ashlar42]

If "on paper" specs are confirmed, would it be safe to assume that GTX 1050 will offer every decoding feature needed for the foreseeable future?

[NikosD]

Yes, you can say so.

Only VP9 10bit needs to be confirmed, something that Kabylake from Intel supports for sure.

[ashlar42]

Only VP9 10bit needs to be confirmed, something that Kabylake from Intel supports for sure.Are there any signs pointing to VP9 to move out of YouTube on to other content providers? Partially off-topic, maybe, I don't know. :)

[sneaker_ger]

The VP9 successor AV1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1) is supposed to be finalized within 6 months. No hardware support yet. But I believe the GTX 1050 will be good enough to warrant its price for now.

[ashlar42]

The VP9 successor AV1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1) is supposed to be finalized within 6 months. No hardware support yet. But I believe the GTX 1050 will be good enough to warrant its price for now.Wow... we're just starting to see a full lineup of HEVC full support from the two major vendors and they're already preparing a new technology? Is there any chance that, by being VP9 capable, the cards will be able to do AV1 as well in hardware?

[nevcairiel]

Is there any chance that, by being VP9 capable, the cards will be able to do AV1 as well in hardware?

Not very likely. But just "finalizing" the codec still puts it years away from wide-spread commercial use, so its nothing to worry about.

HEVC was first approved in 2013, and 3 years later we just have the first consumer content showing up.

To this day, VP9 10-bit is also not to be seen in commercial consumer content, for that matter.

[NikosD]

Is there any chance that, by being VP9 capable, the cards will be able to do AV1 as well in hardware?

It is more or less like expecting from a hardware decoder of H.264/AVC video, to decode in hardware H.265/HEVC video.

[ashlar42]

It is more or less like expecting from a hardware decoder of H.264/AVC video, to decode in hardware H.265/HEVC video.I'm not a coder. So I asked. :)

[NikosD]

It seems that latest Chrome x64 v54 when you write chrome://gpu at the address bar, it says VPx Video Decode: Hardware accelerated for Nvidia and AMD cards.

I don't have an Nvidia card capable of VP9 Hardware acceleration, maybe someone with a GTX 950/960 or Pascal card could try some Youtube VP9 videos.

Also, I don't know if previous versions of Chrome said the same thing.

My Intel system has VP9 acceleration disabled due to a Kabylake VP9 problem with HW acceleration.
You can read more here about Kaby and Chrome:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=654111

Of course my Haswell iGPU even if VP9 acceleration was enabled, it wouldn't accelerate VP9 codec.

The activation of VP9 acceleration on AMD cards is meaningless because no card is capable of VP9 hardware decode, but it's good that it's there.

So, could anyone with an Nvidia card give a try to the new Chrome x64 and VP9 video from Youtube ?

[Trevonn]

It seems that latest Chrome x64 v54 when you write chrome://gpu at the address bar, it says VPx Video Decode: Hardware accelerated for Nvidia and AMD cards.

I don't have an Nvidia card capable of VP9 Hardware acceleration, maybe someone with a GTX 950/960 or Pascal card could try some Youtube VP9 videos.

Also, I don't know if previous versions of Chrome said the same thing.

My Intel system has VP9 acceleration disabled due to a Kabylake VP9 problem with HW acceleration.
You can read more here about Kaby and Chrome:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=654111

Of course my Haswell iGPU even if VP9 acceleration was enabled, it wouldn't accelerate VP9 codec.

The activation of VP9 acceleration on AMD cards is meaningless because no card is capable of VP9 hardware decode, but it's good that it's there.

So, could anyone with an Nvidia card give a try to the new Chrome x64 and VP9 video from Youtube ?

It works for me, CPU usage is only a few percent on a 4K VP9 video

[pirlouy]

About the new chrome release (version 54), there's a bug with GIFs which have artefacts at the beginning. Need to disable flag "Hardware-accelerated video decode" to have correct gifs... but then all hardware decoding is disabled (I know, kinda ironic on this thread).

[el Filou]

About the new chrome release (version 54), there's a bug with GIFs which have artefacts at the beginning. Need to disable flag "Hardware-accelerated video decode" to have correct gifs... but then all hardware decoding is disabled (I know, kinda ironic on this thread).
Are you sure it's really GIFs? For example, when Twitter says a video is GIF, it's actually encoded as an AVC MP4 without sound.

Speaking about VP9, I stumbled upon this page from january: http://flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1452198532 that says YouTube is planning to provide HDR videos "in 2016", which would need to be 10-bit, which would need VP9 Profile 2.
It might be nice then for someone who is looking for a relatively future-proof graphics card to upgrade an older system to make sure their GPU decodes a VP9 Profile 2 bitstream.
I know VP9 still isn't used much outside of YouTube, but YouTube is popular.

[sneaker_ger]

There isn't any PC GPU (card) for VP9 10 bit. Only Intel Kaby Lake.
But AV1 is only a few months ahead. It wouldn't be surprising if Youtube skipped VP9 10 bit and went straight for AV1. Or maybe both.

[NikosD]

Probably AV1 is years ahead for wide adoption, not months.

[sneaker_ger]

Difficult to say. They can roll out the software decoder with Chrome in a matter of days. While AV1 hardware might start spreading only in 2018 or 2019, VP9 10 bit is also barely available. Then again, YouTube can encode both VP9 and AV1 easily as well. HDR videos will only be a tiny fraction of overall videos anyways.

But thinking about it, HDR has its own requirements for OS/driver/display. Do TV SoCs already support VP9 10 bit? If so I agree that VP9 10 bit seems likely.

[clsid]

The HEVC spec was finalized in April 2013. So it took about three years for hardware decoding to become widely available.

[NikosD]

The 1050 Ti is too expensive for HTPC only.

The RX 460 is cheaper even from vanilla 1050.

The main problem here is that both companies AMD and Nvidia have stopped producing cheap entry level cards with low 3D but with full video capabilities, because of the APUs from Intel and AMD.

It's true that all modern CPUs are SoCs (Systems on Chip) with 3 processors (CPU, GPU, Media Processor) that need nothing from a discrete GPU, besides large 3D power for games.

But what about people with no APU or a slow/old iGPU/Media Processor like Sandybridge ?

Do we all have to upgrade to Kabylake or Zen APU in order to get full media capabilities or buy expensive discrete 3D cards just for HTPC ?

[nevcairiel]

The NVIDIA *50 series of cards are not really something I would call expensive. A 750 was available at around 90€, and while the 1050 are still more expensive now, they'll eventually fall again (they have just been released, after all). And AMD has similar offerings (albeit their media block is plagued with problems once again).
But there is just no market for even lower cards, as the CPUs cover that. Cheap products need to sell a lot of stock to be worth producing - and something below a 1050 or RX460 is not going to do that.

[NikosD]

The NVIDIA *50 series of cards are not really something I would call expensive. A 750 was available at around 90€, and while the 1050 are still more expensive now, they'll eventually fall again (they have just been released, after all). And AMD has similar offerings (albeit their media block is plagued with problems once again).
But there is just no market for even lower cards, as the CPUs cover that. Cheap products need to sell a lot of stock to be worth producing - and something below a 1050 or RX460 is not going to do that.

1050 is about 50% more expensive than 90€.

Also 750 Ti 4GB, 950 and 960 are still more expensive than that.

They are about 150€ to 200€.

That's a lot of money for HTPC only, as I said before.


So, your answer didn't reply to my question, because i think it could exist a market from the kind of users I described earlier in my previous post.

[huhn]

the 1050 is not ready for delivery yet but is already at 125 €.
it is very likely that it will drop in price after it gets available in higher numbers.

the HEVC content is very very limited so upgrading a HTPC for "cheap" to get this is simply not important at the moment and a very small market too.

AMD and NVIDIA are creating gaming and professional cards that's there market everything else is an extra.

a cheap card is not going to cut it for UHD anyway the Vram usages is easily over 2 Gb.
a 4Gb card starts at ~125 euro for the rx 460 and the 1050 ti cost about ~150 euro.

i have a 960 for some time now and a UHD screen to and i never really needed the HEVC decoder anyway... it is just a nice to have goodie for now.

[NikosD]

You seem to forget two important things:

Blu-ray UHD and YouTube (or video streaming in general)

And I could add a third one - a lot of Blu-ray movies transcoding from H.264 to H.265.

For the first one you need a HW decoder for HEVC UHD 10bit and for the second a HW decoder for VP9, especially now that the No1 browser, Chrome, has enabled by default the HW acceleration of the default codec - VP9.

Older CPUs and even low cost of new ones, can't handle properly those two codecs.

Those users need to upgrade.

[sneaker_ger]

UHD Blu-ray doesn't work on PCs. Youtube basically only needs VP9 for 4Kp60, there's always AVC to fall back to otherwise. Amazon, Netflix et. al. only use AVC for PC streaming. Actual need for HEVC decoding on PCs is still off.

[huhn]

if they need UHD and the UHD blu ray doesn't work on the PC yet not to mention native HDR.

now you have a very low number of people that can't decode 1080p VP9 with some ancient PCs or atom like PCs. do you really think it is worth to produce a card for these people? getting a new system with a proper CPU is a better investment.

even an i3 is getting bored by youtube VP9 and more important it is not like you have to play the VP9 version the AVC version is going to work splendid. even UHD VP9 works fine on the CPU.

so lets talk about reencodes.
of cause you can do that and you my want to play them.
first the number of HTPC is pretty low. one reason are way cheaper media player. another reason is technically. a media player needs an HDMI cable an HTPC cost more and needs knowledge.

the most important reason for most user to create a HTPC is to game on it too so the low budget cards getting again worthless.

and know it is time to show why hardware decoding isn't important if you aim to play reencodes.
there are a lot of possible ways and good reason to reencode a video in a way that a hardware decoder can't decode them.
if it is just reencoding UHD to FHD 4:4:4 or AVC 10 bit. so if you want to play reencodes you are fast lost with hardware encoders everything else plays on a cheap media player too.

of cause there are some user that would benefit from such a card but the number of people is simply to low.

[NikosD]

@sneaker_ger and huhn

A visit to Intel forums would immediately persuade you that VP9 for a lot Chrome users is a kill.

Really many complaints about that and not for the rare 4K 60fps obviously.

All seems to be as a matter of perspective.

For example, a few posts above you were talking about a yet non-existent codec, AV1, the successor of VP9.

Bluray UHD is much closer to become important than AV1.

And TV/video broadcasting will go to HEVC if it hasn't already gone in some places and services

[huhn]

you can still buy a new PC CPU GPU what ever when the time for HEVC has come.

HEVC broadcast is currently some loops.

if you want to watch UHD right now with an UHD screen but you are missing the GPU to decode the signal i'm sorry but a UHD screen was cheap in the first place.

AMD user don't have VP9 decoding and the world is still turning

[sneaker_ger]

A visit to Intel forums would immediately persuade you that VP9 for a lot Chrome users is a kill.
Yes, it defaults to VP9, unfortunately. Basically buying a card would be useless if it would use AVC instead. There's a Chrome addon for that but unexperienced users have no clue.

For example, a few posts above you were talking about a yet non-existent codec, AV1, the successor of VP9.
Yeah, I'm hypocritical like that. :D But the user specifically asked about future so I deemed it worth mentioning, at least.

And TV/video broadcasting will go to HEVC if it hasn't already gone in some places and services
True. In Germany we already have HEVC for terrestrial but it's only 1080p50 8 bit at low bitrates so not really CPU demanding.

[aufkrawall]

Youtube basically only needs VP9 for 4Kp60, there's always AVC to fall back to otherwise.
You don't want to fall back to YT's H.264 results and also for vids with lower system requirements VP9 hardware decoder might be attractive due to being low on noise and heat, compared to CPU (HTPCs usually don't have an i7).

[CruNcher]

The HEVC spec was finalized in April 2013. So it took about three years for hardware decoding to become widely available.

It took roughly a year for the first GPU Hybrid solutions and not much time after that for the first full Hardware IP Cores adoption rate was much faster then with H.264 overall ;)

Also 750 Ti 4GB, 950 and 960 are still more expensive than that.

They are about 150€ to 200€.

That's a lot of money for HTPC only, as I said before.

Kaby Lake + LGA 1151 motherboard + DDR4 RAM is more expensive than a single GTX 1050 Ti or GTX 1050.

Discrete cards are so easy to upgrade, just plug in and enjoy instead of building a new Kaby Lake PC, installing Windows or OpenELEC etc.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10610/intel-announces-7th-gen-kaby-lake-14nm-plus-six-notebook-skus-desktop-coming-in-january/3



That's really embarassing on Intel's part, still no HDMI 2.0 support when Nvidia had it since 2014. One can only hope the upcoming desktop Kaby Lake & Z270 chipset has HDMI 2.0b support like Nvidia Pascal GPUs all do.



So, your answer didn't reply to my question, because i think it could exist a market from the kind of users I described earlier in my previous post.

Same Price or even lower Nvidia Shield and you 4K HDR capable ;)

HTPC is nonsense for these low requirement tasks ;)

Also having 2 Media blocks inside the System for AVG user is total nonsense if you could use the discreet die space more efficiently.


The trend is visible already that we gonna see Full Updateable Hardware Cores in the Future on the CPU/APU side, which also is gonna lower adoption time by a very big amount, time to market efficiency will greatly be enhanced.

You can even soon buy very cheap laptops and refunctioning them without any problems to whatever you want modular ;)

[NikosD]

Checking out features regarding video decoding/encoding in HW on discrete cards and prices (Greece) I have a few comments to add:

AMD:

The least expensive card for HW 4K H.264 decoding/encoding was R9 380 ~200€ without HW H.265/VP9 decoding/encoding, before Polaris release.

Now with RX 460 (Polaris 11) at ~120€ you can get 4K HW decoding/encoding of both H.264 & H.265 (8bit & 10bit) and in near (?) future VP9 hybrid decoding with a new driver.

All of the above with a TDP < 75W

For HTPC and video acceleration (HW decoding/encoding) the RX 460 is like a miracle for AMD users, a huge step forward, the best card by far, supporting FreeSync, HDMI 2.0b with HDCP 2.2 and HDR etc (all modern features of HTPC)

For faster 3D you could go to a RX 470, probably the best VFM for 1080p gaming, with all HTPC features like RX 460.

BUT still there is no AMD card <100€ for HW acceleration of HEVC/VP9 or even 4K H.264


Nvidia:

Maxwell GM206 chips (750 v2, 950, 960) support 4K H.264 & H.265 (8bit & 10bit) along with VP9 acceleration in HW.

But 750 v2 is extremely rare and >100 € with low 3D power, 950 costs ~160€ and 960 costs ~200€

Now with Pascal 1050/ 1050 Ti you can get even 8K (useless for now) acceleration (very fast) of HEVC/ VP9 (and 12 bit of HEVC - useless for now) and better VFM than Maxwell in 3D power, with very low TDP but still at ~130€ and ~170€ respectively.

Again, like AMD, there is no Nvidia card <100€ for HW acceleration of HEVC/VP9, the least expensive card starts at ~130€.

My conclusion is that the days of cheap entry level or budget or HTPC or whatever you want to call them cards, are gone.

Those cards had little 3D power, sometimes passive cooler for complete silence, with full video acceleration capabilities and HTPC features at a price of 40€ - 50€

The story of Cruncher with fully update-able hardware cores in the future, sounds like a nice sci-fi movie to me.

[aufkrawall]

I think we still don't know if Polaris' VP9 decoder is hybrid?
If we're lucky, it'd be native. On the other hand, it could simply be broken and never get activated (happened before...).
Hybrid decoder is also very bad in conjuction with madVR if shaders are used for decoding like it was with GM204 and HEVC 8 bit.

[NikosD]

Exactly, your comment is to the point.

From the words used by AMD to describe the VP9 decoder, I think it is hybrid.

[CruNcher]

Makes no sense that it takes so long ergo it's Hybrid i guess we have to wait for VEGA to see the full Hardware Decode it just wasn't ready yet which is a pain again seeing how long Nvidia has it ready now since X1

[NikosD]

Nvidia released GM206 (GTX 960) on January 2015 and enabled the pure HW decoder of VP9 on December 2015 via a driver.

We all thought it would have been hybrid, but it wasn't.

Nvidia just decided to bury a full 4K VP9 HW decoder for almost a year (!)

We really aren't inside the heads of people deciding such things in big companies.

[aufkrawall]

And in the meantime, browsers got VP9 hardware support too (Firefox should follow shortly with version 51).
So it's really about time to have it ready in the drivers.

[NikosD]

It is true that MS released DXVA2 VP9 spec around early October of 2015, but we could/ should know that GM206 had a VP9 HW decoder inside from the beginning.

It is like HEVC 12bit HW decoder of Pascal.

There is no DXVA2 spec from MS for that yet (I don't know if they will ever release it), but Nvidia has already advertised it and we all know that Pascal is capable of HEVC 12bit acceleration.

The question still remains why Nvidia hadn't told anything for a year regarding VP9 HW decoder of GM206.

Of course, it doesn't really matter right now, one year after the activation of VP9 acceleration.

[CruNcher]

Ehh it was known from day 1 that GM206 included it like X1 does, there was no real secret about it.

Though Microsoft was late at the party for support when the whole Linux Mobile Ecosystem already adapted it ;)

And it was not sure when it really would take of and to promote it at all, all these are normal business considerations.

Nvidia allways likes to be prepared very early on especialy with their Linux Mobile side adventure they not do short decissioning phases like Intel for example does and can afford todo so being ready in no time and react ;)

[NikosD]

Do you have a link, presentation, slide of Nvidia advertising VP9 HW decoder of GM206 ?

We didn't even know that GM206 had different video decoder than the rest of the family (GTX 970/980) till we tested the decoder using DXVA2 H.265 files (8bit/10bit)

[CruNcher]

As i told you in the Sync Planing and Cycle completion with X1 it was logical Tegra mostly drives the VPX decisions these days and not only that since Maxwell ;)

And that only GM206 had it is pre planing of Nvidia as well based on the System needs of the user base and how much sense it makes in target range for GTX 970/980 based system it made no sense from the decoding complexity point at all, which saves die space for other things that are more important for that target group ;)

Nvidia very well knows their target groups and is planing in detail on it beforehand to save as much as possible in their end Designs they dont waste any flop or give it for free, they calculate so exactly with their data and make predictions even it's crazy how mostly right they are though they obviously also try to change it to their advantage helping a little.

This is what Roy Taylor at AMD tries to finally brake knowing his ex employer inside out, because he partly developed the most important strategies back then, that brought ATI and then AMD almost to it's knees ;)