Quicksync worsens performance

[Robb]

I'm finding that just using software encoding is much more reliable and better quality than hardware. Is Quicksync just not very good? When I turn it on, the graphics get so bad the game is unplayable. That's if the game is even displaying at all and not crashing.

Varies between games, but for example, Fallout 4 just became a blocky mess after playing for a few minutes and Rocket League just freezes at the title screen. Spelunky becomes a complete mess along with freezes at title screen (although turning it off caused a freeze during the into sequence, but then recovers and works fine once you get into the game)

Hardware decoding seems to make no difference from tests I've done.

Is this usual? Am I missing something or doing something wrong? I was hoping to improve performance and bought a HDMI cable to plug into my motherboard port to enable the Intel GPU (as I couldn't enable Quicksync without it) but it seems to just be a waste. Would getting a new GPU help so I could do NVIDIA hardware encoding?


Host specs:
Windows 10 64-bit
Gigabyte Z68P-DS3
Geforce GTX 465
Intel Core i5-2500K
8GB RAM

Client specs:
Toshiba Satellite P50-B-10R
Windows 10 64-bit
ATI Radeon R9 M265
Intel Core i7 4710HQ
16GB RAM

[[masni] CYKA CLEANER]

Try to disable amd card on clinet, to use intel for decoding, yeah nvidia is best option.

[fiah]

I've played quite some Rocket League using Quicksync on my i5-2500K and my experience is a lot different from yours. It just works, and with the bandwidth set to 30mbit/s the quality good enough that I forget about and just play the game. Only very dark areas cause some artifacts that make it obvious that the game is being streamed. The quality of software encoding is better in general, but at 30mbit/s the difference is minimal in my experience, and the reduced CPU load more than makes up for it because it means that I can finally just stream GTA V to my HTPC with great performance. In fact from what I read on this forum, the combination of Intel hardware encoding and Intel hardware decoding seems to be the most stable and well-tested configuration out there, so like CYKA CLEANER I'd recommend that you check your settings to make sure Quicksync is also used on the client to accelerate decoding. Enable the performance information on the client and press F6 to see what encoder and decoder is being used.

[powerarmour]

I find QuickSync encoding on my host preferable to NVFBC personally, the display latency alone is roughly halved compared to NVENC.

I do have a 5th Gen Broadwell though, which has newer features/grunt. Make sure your drivers are up to date also.

[[masni] CYKA CLEANER]

Can you post screen shot with statistic on broadwell encoding? Or what is encode time? Thanks

[henryg]

QuickSync on anything older than a 4xxx series Intel CPU is not performing very well. We should probably disable it by default if we detect this type of CPU on the host.

In general, Software Encoding is the best possible quality, but it takes some CPU cycles away from the game. NVENC (NVIDIA) and QuickSync (Intel) are on by default because most systems that support them can do so with pretty decent quality, and they do not use as many CPU cycles.

If Software Encoding does not slow down your game too much, then it is always the best choice.

[fiah]

Originally posted by henryg:

QuickSync on anything older than a 4xxx series Intel CPU is not performing very well. We should probably disable it by default if we detect this type of CPU on the host.

it still performes miles better than the broken AMD encoder or the software encoder in any kind of demanding game. And frankly, on my i5-2500K I haven't really noticed it performing worse than the software encoder in non-demanding games either. If you disable it by default, many AMD users will just conclude that in-home streaming is broken because they'll have 2 hardware H264 encoders in their system, neither of which are being used.

[Dongripper]

Originally posted by henryg:

QuickSync on anything older than a 4xxx series Intel CPU is not performing very well. We should probably disable it by default if we detect this type of CPU on the host.

In general, Software Encoding is the best possible quality, but it takes some CPU cycles away from the game. NVENC (NVIDIA) and QuickSync (Intel) are on by default because most systems that support them can do so with pretty decent quality, and they do not use as many CPU cycles.

If Software Encoding does not slow down your game too much, then it is always the best choice.

Please do not disable QuickSync on Intel CPUs older than 4xxx series! I have an i7 3770k and 2x GeForce GTX 670 in SLI and QuickSync gives me clearly the best and consistent performance over the other encoding options in games using dx10 and 11. Only for some dx9 games NVENC performs better.

Sure the QuickSync encoding quality in sandy/ivy bridge CPUs can be blocky sometimes, but I can live with that for now.

The problem with NVENC in my setup is that there is a severe fps drop in scenarios where QuickSync can hold a constant 60fps in dx10 or dx11 games. And now when the occasional "black screen flash" has been fixed in QuickSync encoding it would really ruin my in home streaming if it would be disabled as an option.

[henryg]

Sorry for the scare, we're not going to disable it unless we have proof that it's broken :)