Haswell card performance for video editing at 2560x1440

[psycholioben]

Can a Haswell cpu run 2560x1440 well for hd video editing and converting? I'm trying to run on integrated graphics only, no dedicated card.

 

[8350rocks]

Video editing is not good on haswell iGPU.

I would recommend the A10-6800k in a build like this:

PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/18sI4
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/18sI4/by_merchant/
Benchmarks: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/18sI4/benchmarks/

CPU: AMD A10-6800K 4.1GHz Quad-Core Processor ($139.99 @ Microcenter)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($29.98 @ Outlet PC)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4 ATX FM2 Motherboard ($118.98 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1866 Memory ($64.80 @ Newegg)
Storage: Toshiba 500GB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Raidmax Tornado (Black/Red) ATX Mid Tower Case ($19.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: SeaSonic 300W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V Power Supply ($43.98 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: LG GH24NS95 DVD/CD Writer ($14.99 @ Newegg)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (OEM) (64-bit) ($89.98 @ Outlet PC)
Total: $572.68
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-06-20 14:45 EDT-0400)

 

[jaguarskx]

Intel's Quick-Sync technology (CPU + iGPU) is certainly much faster than CPU only video rendering. I have not seen any benchmarks for Haswell, so for now I can only provide Ivy Bridge's Intel HD 4000 benchmarks from last year. Also note that only specific software supports Quick-Sync such as MediaExpresso.

Source: http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/37989-intel-core-i7-3770k-22nm-ivy-bridge/?page=10

The following benchmark shows off "Assisted Video Transcoding" which means using Intel's Quick Sync, AMD iGPU accelerated (listed as AMD Trinity - HD7660G) and nVidia's CUDA technologies. The benchmarks also includes CPU only video encoding as well.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5835/testing-opencl-accelerated-handbrakex264-with-amds-trinity-apu

The benchmarks clearly shows that Intel's Quick Sync technology does make it a superior solution for video encoding as long as you use a program that supports Quick Sync. If you use Handbrake, then you should be happy to hear that back in April 2013 the developers stated they intend to include Quick Sync compatibility in the next version.

 

[jaguarskx]

There is no point in up-scaling a video source to higher resolution like 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 unless you are in the video industry where you have access to proprietary software used by studios like MGM to transfer and upgrade old films to blu-ray format and have access to a lot of different filters to offset the loss in quality and possible image artifacts that can occur when doing up-scaling.

If you have access to that, then I do not recommend you build a PC, but instead build a workstation.

I recommend that you simply encode to the exact same resolution as the source. You will loose a lot less quality than if you attempted up-scale the source. Plus if you up-scale you will also need to significantly increase the bit rate to get a good quality encode; but the quality will be lower compared to a video encoded to the same resolution as the source.

Up-scaling also means your encoding time increase due to higher pixel count. That combined with a loss of quality and increase in file size due to the higher bit rate make up-scaling a bad proposition. Additionally, when encoding to either the same size or lower resolution, you can use the Precise Bicubic filter (I use the 0.75) setting, and it will maintain pretty good quality and offer pretty good encoding time. When up-scaling video the Precise Bicubic filter is not exactly the filter to use since it can induce some video artifacts which means the overall quality will not be as good as it could be. The preferred filter to use would be Lanczos3 since the algorithm reduces possible artifacts by a good deal from what I've read. The problem with Lanczos3 is that it is pretty complex and it will reduce your encoding speed even further.


In short:

Do not upscale the source, the penalties in encoding time, file size and video quality more or less trumps anything good that you can think of. It is best left for the graphics card to do the up-scaling on the fly.

 

[psycholioben]

I will not be upscaling videos; I simply want a monitor with a 2560x1440 resolution.

I don't want to sacrifice upgradability in order to get an AMD. I really wish Intel's newest chip was good enough to run 2560x1440 with a nice framerate, because I want to retain the option of turning it into a gaming rig by adding a dedicated card and some extra ram.

 

[8350rocks]

I will not be upscaling videos; I simply want a monitor with a 2560x1440 resolution.

I don't want to sacrifice upgradability in order to get an AMD. I really wish Intel's newest chip was good enough to run 2560x1440 with a nice framerate, because I want to retain the option of turning it into a gaming rig by adding a dedicated card and some extra ram.

The AMD rig will make a gaming pc with a discrete GPU...

 

[psycholioben]

Yeah, but the AMD is on FM2 which is almost outdated and is a lesser quality computational cpu, and the Haswell is on a newer chipset which might continue to be upgradable and has higher computational power. I don't want a disposable computer.

 

[jaguarskx]

I will not be upscaling videos; I simply want a monitor with a 2560x1440 resolution.

I don't want to sacrifice upgradability in order to get an AMD. I really wish Intel's newest chip was good enough to run 2560x1440 with a nice framerate, because I want to retain the option of turning it into a gaming rig by adding a dedicated card and some extra ram.

From the way you phrased your question it implied you were looking at upscaling to 2560x1440 during the encoding process.

Regardless, the Intel HD 4600 will have no problems playing back 1920x1080 video.

As indicated by the benchmarks I provided, Intel's Quick Sync offers very good video encoding performance as long as you use a program that supports Quick Sync; especially if you look at the Assisted Video Transcoding chart. Haswell is not present in the chart because the benchmarks were done just over a year ago. However, Intel included additional integrated hardware over Ivy Bridge to assist in the decoding and encoding of videos in the Intel HD 4600 graphics core.

The benchmark shows encoding from whatever source material to 1280x720p. Had the target resolution been 1920x1080, the encoding times would have been much higher. Focusing solely on CPU encoding performance the i7-3720QM was able to encode the video in 71 seconds. AMD's Trinity A10-4600m took nearly twice as long to encode the video at 135 seconds. Clearly Intel's Ivy Bridge CPU cores is more ideal for video encoding as opposed to the A10-4600m. If the A10-4600m takes 12 hours to encode a blu-ray using the 2-pass method encoding method to produce a high quality rip using whatever specific settings to create it, then based on the benchmarks the Intel Ivy Bridge i7-3720QM would be able to do that same encode in 6.31 hours or approximately 6 hours and 20 minutes, thus shaving off 5 hours and 40 minutes from the process. Note, these are notebook CPUs not desktop CPUs.

Looking that the "Assisted Video Transcoding" benchmarks, the i7-3720QM took 12 seconds to complete the encoding process when using the Quick Sync capabilities of the Intel HD 4000 graphics core. With the assistance of the integrated Radeon HD 7660G core (OpenCL), the A10-4600m took 74 seconds to do the same job. While faster than relying solely on Trinity's CPU cores, it is slightly slower than when the i7-3760QM only relies in the CPU core. 12 seconds vs. 74 seconds means Intel's Quick Sync is slightly more than 6x faster than AMD's OpenCL solution and just barely slower when not using Quick Sync.

Looking at the performance charts you can dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to encode videos by opting for an Intel CPU; Haswell in this case. Another way of looking at it, you can encode more blu-ray movies in one day than you can with AMD's APU. Since Intel has released Haswell and AMD has released Richland, I am sure both have made some improvement. But I would say that Intel's Quick Sync will still dominate AMD's OpenCL.

 

[psycholioben]

So the Richland would be better for integrated gaming, but the Haswell will be better for dedicated gaming. The Haswell is better for encoding with certain programs. Both should be good enough to playback 1920x1080 video, and both will allow a 2560x1440 resolution without slowing down, right?

 

[8350rocks]

This shows the A10-6800K in handbrake:

This shows transcoding with espresso...(note the A10-6800k is actually faster than the i7-3960x here with OpenCL enabled).

This is in FryRender 64:

This shows the iGPU on the A10-6800k is dramatically better than the one on the 4770k:

 

[jaguarskx]

This shows transcoding with espresso...(note the A10-6800k is actually faster than the i7-3960x here with OpenCL enabled).

I would add that the performance chart excludes Quick Sync benchmarks for the Intel CPUs which will likely be lower than AMD's OpenCL results.

 

[jaguarskx]

So the Richland would be better for integrated gaming, but the Haswell will be better for dedicated gaming. The Haswell is better for encoding with certain programs. Both should be good enough to playback 1920x1080 video, and both will allow a 2560x1440 resolution without slowing down, right?

If you are relying on integrated graphics, then the Richland A10-6800k would offer better gaming performance. But you need to install DDR3 2133MHz RAM otherwise the iGPU is not really much faster than the iGPU in the Trinity A10-5800k APU. However, the Radeon HD 8670D is only as fast as a desktop Radeon HD 6670 DDR3 graphics card which has 74% the performance of a desktop Radeon HD 6670 DDR5 graphics card. The basically puts the integrated Radeon HD 8760D's performance halfway between a desktop Radeon HD 5570 and Radeon HD 5670. The Intel HD 4600 graphics core is basically the equivalent to a Radeon HD 5570.

As for a dedicated graphics card performance. You will get better performance with a Haswell / Ivy Bridge CPU. The caveat is when installing a Radeon HD 7750 or other slower Radeon HD cards in the 6xxx / 7xxx series. The Richland APU is capable of enabling dual graphic with these cards for a boost in performance. However, in games that are CPU dependent (like Skyrim and StarCraft 2) a Haswell / Ivy Bridge + Radoen HD 7750 combo will probably offer the same or better performance than the Richland + Radeon HD 7750 combo. Anything faster than the Radeon HD 7750 or any nVidia card will automatically disable the integrated Radeon HD 8760D. That means Haswell / Ivy Bridge would simply dominate the Richland APU.

Both Intel HD 4600 and AMD Radeon HD 8670D should not have problems scaling up 1920x1080 video to fit a 1440p monitor as far as I know. Scaling up video is much easier than decoding very high bit rate encoded video.