Question / Help A few questions regarding Hardware Encoding (Intel QuickSync and AMD VCE)

[petersaints]

I know that Hardware-based Encoding is not very well supported under OBS, specially AMD VCE. But I wanted to know a few things about these two technologies.

First of all, which one has a lower performance impact while recording? One will tax my CPU iGPU (Intel QuickSync), the other will use an ASIC on my GPU. In theory, both will leave my CPU cores and my dedicated GPU's Stream Processors free for the game itself. Am I right? Still, does one tend to perform better than the other in terms of performance impact?

Besides the performance impact I'm also interested in quality. Which one provides better quality at similar settings (resolution, bit rate, etc.)?

 

[Harold]

quicksync is the better quality per bitrate than VCE, and since you generally aren't using the igpu at all anyway it actually offers the better performance.

 

[petersaints]

I'm using the iGPU for the Windows Desktop and most applications, but yeah, it's probably not being used to its fullest. Even though it's a pretty weak Intel HD 4000 since my CPU is from the Ivy Bridge era.

Speaking of Ivy Bridge, that also means that this is not the greatest and latest version of Intel QuickSync. It's only QuickSync 2.0. The same is true for my dedicated GPU which is a Cape Verde-based card with VCE 1.0.

It is really true that quality wise QuickSync 2.0 > VCE 1.0 at the same bit rate?«

 

[Harold]

I'm using the iGPU for the Windows Desktop and most applications,

If you're on a desktop, no you're not actually.

 

[petersaints]

But it is not a desktop. It is a laptop. However, even though I knew that the iGPU could be completely disabled on Desktops, I didn't know that you could have it enabled and not use it at all, other than for Video Encoding, OpenCL, etc.