What are the Differences Between Hardware and Software Encoding?

[BananaMuffinFrenzy]

And how can it affect streaming quality? I've heard that in-home streaming currently does not support hardware encoding (or something along those lines), but I'm not entirely sure what that means performance-wise.

[paulcd2000]

Hardware encoding is wayyyyy faster. Hugely, unreasonably faster. Software encoding is more flexible in terms of being able to handle more codecs (not an issue here), more compression levels (possibly an issue here), and other codec settings (also possibly an issue here).

[Roger the Shrubber]

But keep in mind, even though there is an option in the settings to disable hardware encoding, some Valve employees have made it clear in these discussions that the current betas are limited to software encoding, and hardware encoding will be implemented in an upcoming beta.

To use hardware encoding you'll have to have hardware with a dedicated encoder. If you've got an Intel Processor with QuickSync (Haswell, Ivy Bridge and some Sandy Bridge) or a recent Nvidia Geforce GTX card (GTX 650 or newer, but not laptop cards) you've got a dedicated video encoder in your system. Utilizing this hardware would have almost no measurable impact on a game's performance, as the heavily lifting of encoding the video is being done by completely different hardware from the CPU and GPU that are tasked with rendering your game.

Someone will have to fill me in if ATI has included encoding hardware on any CPUs or GPUs.

The software-only state of the current beta is currently killing my In-Home streaming performance. I have a GTX 760 so hardware encoding would probably would great, but my CPU is woefully underpowered, so streaming destroys game performance and I'm getting lots of that "Slow Encode" message in the performance overlay.

[Dalingrin]

AFAIK there is no option for hardware encoding at the moment. I believe you are confusing it with hardware decoding.

[BananaMuffinFrenzy]

Originally posted by Maddux:

To use hardware encoding you'll have to have hardware with a dedicated encoder. If you've got an Intel Processor with QuickSync (Haswell, Ivy Bridge and some Sandy Bridge) or a recent Nvidia Geforce GTX card (GTX 650 or newer, but not laptop cards) you've got a dedicated video encoder in your system.

Interesting, so I could potentially offload the actual "streaming" process to quicksync on my Ivy Bridge CPU in combination with using my AMD GPU? (Or would I have to be using the integrated CPU graphics in order to utilize quicksync?)

[paulcd2000]

Originally posted by BananaMuffinFrenzy:

Interesting, so I could potentially offload the actual "streaming" process to quicksync on my Ivy Bridge CPU in combination with using my AMD GPU? (Or would I have to be using the integrated CPU graphics in order to utilize quicksync?)

Once it's fully supported, you'll probably be able to offload the encoding to the quick sync on your cpu.

[grumpycrab]

Originally posted by Maddux:

...but my CPU is woefully underpowered, so streaming destroys game performance and I'm getting lots of that "Slow Encode" message in the performance overlay.

Same here. If you reduce "Limit Bandwidth" to 5Mbps (at client) that'll reduce the encoding effort...

[Roger the Shrubber]

Originally posted by grumpycrab:

Same here. If you reduce "Limit Bandwidth" to 5Mbps (at client) that'll reduce the encoding effort...

Thanks, that helped a lot. The experience still isn't good, but at least it's playable (if not just barely) for several games. Looking forward to when the beta supports hardware encoding.

[Roger the Shrubber]

Originally posted by Dalingrin:

AFAIK there is no option for hardware encoding at the moment. I believe you are confusing it with hardware decoding.

Actually, you're right that there isn't any setting for hardware encode, I skimmed too quickly. It's definitely for disabling "decoding." Some Valve employees have made it clear that it's coming, so I just assumed it was a non-functional place-holder.

[Omega X]

Originally posted by Maddux:

Someone will have to fill me in if ATI has included encoding hardware on any CPUs or GPUs.

AMD Radeons have had hardware video codecs for a while now. Its called VCE and UVD. AMD APUs also have the same hardware video codecs. The FX CPUs without a GPU probably doesn't have a dedicated codec.