Nvidia Pascal HEVC

[zzzxxxccc]

Hi everyone,

I was thinking about about a GPU upgrade and leaning towards Nvidia's Pascal series over AMD's. I understand Pascal family can decode up to 4k 12bit and encode up to 4k 10bit as well as decode VP9? It's the encoding I'm confused on.
Pascals run the same ASIC IP block for hardware HEVC encode/decode in the family right? so encoding HEVC (NVEnc) on a GTX 1050 is the same as a GTX 1080? So it wouldn't matter which which you buy in terms of NVEnc encoding.
But I also read that in encoding, a lot of VRAM is used and more memory bandwidth is better? So it would be more worth while spending a bit more for say a 1060 than say an entry level 1050?

Thanks in advance for the help

[sneaker]

Pascals run the same ASIC IP block for hardware HEVC encode/decode in the family right? so encoding HEVC (NVEnc) on a GTX 1050 is the same as a GTX 1080? So it wouldn't matter which which you buy in terms of NVEnc encoding.

That is actually not 100% verified at the moment. There have been reports that the 1050 (ti) (GP107) has VP9 10 bit (maybe even 12 bit) decode while 1060 (GP106) and 1070/1080 (GP104) do not. It is possible there may be other differences as well though we do not have any evidence in either direction yet.

[zzzxxxccc]

That is actually not 100% verified at the moment. There have been reports that the 1050 (ti) (GP107) has VP9 10 bit (maybe even 12 bit) decode while 1060 (GP106) and 1070/1080 (GP104) do not. It is possible there may be other differences as well though we do not have any evidence in either direction yet.

Thanks for the info.

[sophisticles]

That is actually not 100% verified at the moment. There have been reports that the 1050 (ti) (GP107) has VP9 10 bit (maybe even 12 bit) decode while 1060 (GP106) and 1070/1080 (GP104) do not. It is possible there may be other differences as well though we do not have any evidence in either direction yet.

I just looked all over Nvidia's website, according to their docs they do state that certain Pascal based cards will feature 10/12 bit decode for VP8/VP9 at resolutions up to 8k.

Personally I consider these non-features, i.e. let's assume that the 1050 family of cards does in fact feature decode support for 10/12 bit VP9, when was the last time anyone, outside of some in-house testing lab somewhere, actually saw a 10 or 12 bit VP9 source?

That's the big problem with these technologies, by the time the general public has access to content that actually requires these features (assuming we ever see 12 bit 8k VP9 content) the cards sill be obsolete and or cpu's may be fast enough with, with enough cores, to decode them in software.

[sneaker]

Youtube uses VP9 10 bit for HDR.

But differences could not only be new formats but faster en-/decoding or higher quality encoding of formats already supported on older chips. I doubt this is the case here but I have seen little proof yet.

[sophisticles]

Youtube uses VP9 10 bit for HDR.

Do you happen to have any links to any of these 10 bit VP9 videos? I'd love to download them and have a peak, should be a nice test for this system.

[sneaker]

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyqf6gJt7KuGArjMwHmgprtDeY8WDa8YX
Download VP9 profile 2 ("vp9.2") streams using e.g. youtube-dl. Playback: latest LAV nightly or MPC-BE nightly + madvr.

[sophisticles]

Very interesting, if I try and download using 4kdownloader, it shows an option to download "The World in HDR" in "original" 4k but what I get is a 15 mb/s AVC 4k file (still a beauty in it's own right) but youtube-dl from the command line allows me to download a webm encapsulated VP9 4k 59.97fps video of higher bit rate.

The thing with these files is that Media Info doesn't show it as being a 10bit but it could be that Media Info is incapable of displaying that info, I tend to believe it is because I can play 8bit VP9 just fine on my system but no player available on Fedora is capable of playing the videos, on the bright side I found that ShotCut can edit them just fine.

There has to be a media player that will play these back on Linux.

[sneaker]

Try mpv.