GPU powered HEVC encoding is here, sort of.

[sophisticles]

I was just reading the review over at Tom's of the new GTX970 and 980 and this quote caught my eye:

Nvidia also updates its latest GPU with H.265 (HEVC) encoding support, providing a nice future-looking upgrade. As for existing H.264 support, keep in mind that Maxwell's fixed-function video encoder, already available on the GeForce GTX 750, is improved with 2.5x the throughput compared to previous-generation Kepler hardware. Nvidia's ShadowPlay software now features 4K video support at 60 FPS on the GM204, and this capability could possibly be enabled for other Maxwell-based cards in the future.

That didn't take long. I wonder how long it will be before we see software that actually supports this feature, how fast it will be and more importantly the quality of the encode.

[LigH.de]

If the complexity limits will be as tight as usual hardware AVC encoders, I won't be impressed much by hardware encoded HEVC. It will be fast, and possibly convenient at sufficient bitrates. But when bitrate limits decrease, the quality will obviously decrease too.

[Hoser Rob]

GPU encoding is poor quality now. Why would I believe this would be any better? Tom's isn't a very reliable source.

[hogger129]

GPU encoding is poor quality now. Why would I believe this would be any better? Tom's isn't a very reliable source.

Why do you say it is poor quality? Serious question.

[pandy]

GPU encoding is poor quality now. Why would I believe this would be any better? Tom's isn't a very reliable source.

Why do you say it is poor quality? Serious question.

Because it is designed to be fast and cheap not hq fast and cheap.

[hogger129]

GPU encoding is poor quality now. Why would I believe this would be any better? Tom's isn't a very reliable source.

Why do you say it is poor quality? Serious question.

Because it is designed to be fast and cheap not hq fast and cheap.

Touché. But it's still nice to be able to encode a 1080p movie in under an hour.

[sophisticles]

GPU encoding is poor quality now. Why would I believe this would be any better? Tom's isn't a very reliable source.

You are probably right, Tom's has "only" been around about 15 years or so, they haven't had enough time to really build up the relationships required to be able to get reliable information. If only there were some other respected site that said the same thing.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-review/5

Surprisingly, even after only 7 months since the first Maxwell 1 GPUs, NVIDIA has once again overhauled NVENC, and this time more significantly. The Maxwell 2 version of NVENC further builds off of the Maxwell 1 NVENC by adding full support for HEVC (H.265) encoding. Like HDMI 2.0 support, this marks the very first PC GPU we’ve seen integrate support for this more advanced codec.

I guess you are right, Tom's had no idea what they were talking about.

I hope you appreciate what I did here ^ .

[jagabo]

Because [GPU encoding] is designed to be fast and cheap not hq fast and cheap.

Touché. But it's still nice to be able to encode a 1080p movie in under an hour.

My i5 2500K can encode a typical 1080p movie in ~45 minutes using x264's veryfast preset. At that preset it's still delivers better quality than CUDA or QS at the same file size.

[Selur]

At that preset it's still delivers better quality than CUDA or QS at the same file size.

Does your i5 support icq+lookahead with QS?

----

Nice to see HEVC hardware encoding (and probably decoding) support, hoping for some more affordable cards with the same encoding/decoding chips. (or is this really GPU and not VPU support?)
+ sadly looking at the article over at anandtech, it seems like this is Main-only support (I was hoping for at least Main10)

[sophisticles]

Does your i5 support icq+lookahead with QS?

Those features were introduced with Haswell.

[jagabo]

I have a Haswell CPU too, a 4130T in my HTPC (slow, low power, 2 core + hyperthreading). It's QS encoder is a little faster than the Sandy Bridge i5 2500K. And the picture quality a little better.

[Gravitator]

Привет!
What is the bottleneck in such hardware encoders? To me, this whole section of motion estimation

[pandy]

Touché. But it's still nice to be able to encode a 1080p movie in under an hour.

Nope - encoding process is asymmetric - it means that movie is viewed multiple number of times and encoded only once - i.e. it wise to dedicate reasonable amount of time to hq encoding unless we don't care about quality or bandwidth is not the case (so home user case and most of users have no legal hq sources anyway) - that's way GPU encoding is niche for lq encoding or home medium q cases.

[Stears555]

Why is HEVC HW decoding necessary? There are not much difference in CPU usage between AVC and HEVC 1080p software (CPU) decoding with the help of the latest LAV decoder!

[jagabo]

Why is HEVC HW decoding necessary? There are not much difference in CPU usage between AVC and HEVC 1080p software (CPU) decoding with the help of the latest LAV decoder!

HEVC should eventually be able to compress to half the bitrate of AVC with similar quality. If you're a high volume online video source that cuts your monthly bandwidth costs in half.

Oh, sorry, you were asking about decoding, not encoding.

[pandy]

Why is HEVC HW decoding necessary? There are not much difference in CPU usage between AVC and HEVC 1080p software (CPU) decoding with the help of the latest LAV decoder!

HW decoding will reduce power consumption and jitter (in typical OS) - that's why having HW decoder is so important (also point to my previous answer - it will be used so frequently when encoding is performed rather rarely).

I see big difference in CPU load between HW and SW decoder.