[Cin] Prepping HW upgrade options for AV1 de-/encoding

Sun Dec 17 01:23:30 CET 2023

ср, 13 дек. 2023 г., 19:02 Terje J. Hanssen <terjejhanssen at gmail.com>:

>
>
> Den 11.12.2023 14:23, skrev Andrew Randrianasulu:
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>
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> пн, 11 дек. 2023 г., 16:13 Terje J. Hanssen via Cin <
> cin at lists.cinelerra-gg.org>:
>
>>
>>
>> Den 08.12.2023 23:56, skrev Terje J. Hanssen:
>>
>>
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>> Den 08.12.2023 12:50, skrev Andrew Randrianasulu:
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>> пт, 8 дек. 2023 г., 13:57 Andrew Randrianasulu <randrianasulu at gmail.com>:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> пт, 8 дек. 2023 г., 13:37 Terje J. Hanssen via Cin <
>>> cin at lists.cinelerra-gg.org>:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Den 03.12.2023 22:29, skrev Terje J. Hanssen:
>>>>
>>>> Already touched this topic barely in another thread
>>>> https://lists.cinelerra-gg.org/pipermail/cin/2023-December/007346.html
>>>>
>>>> But so many SW and HW pieces are mentioned around, it is almost a
>>>> full-time reading and study:
>>>> VAAPI, MESA, VULKAN, Intel Quick Sync Video etc......
>>>>
>>>> I realize my aging hardware which is fast enough for other tasks, needs
>>>> some "AV1 upgrade", if possible.
>>>>
>>>> But first I wonder, what is expected possible to do (obtain) with AV1
>>>> de-/encoding on my existing 64bit hardware:
>>>>
>>>> 1) laptop 2018: Dell XPS 13-9370: quad core i7-8550U CPU (8. gen
>>>> Kabylake) and Intel UHD Graphics
>>>>
>>>> 2) WS infinity:  MSI Z170A mobo:  quad core i7-6700K CPU (6. gen
>>>> Skylake), NVIDIA GeForce GT-730 graphics
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> A budget friendly first "AV1 HW upgrade" of the workstation 2) if
>>>> possible, would be to add a new GPU as Intel Arc A380.
>>>> But the question is if this will work at all on that much older (2015)
>>>> Skylake platform with i7-6700K CPU?
>>>> I've seen CPU bottlenecks has been mentioned and that Arc A380 is
>>>> targeted at newer generations CPU ...
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Extracted from the first wikipedia reference below about Intel
>>>> Alchemist GPUs:
>>>>
>>>>    - Featuring 8 Xe-cores, the* A380 supports PCI Express 4.0* and has
>>>>    a total board power (TBP) of 75W. The graphics card is equipped with 6GB
>>>>    GDDR6 memory and a graphics memory interface of 96 bits, providing a memory
>>>>    bandwidth of 186GB/s.
>>>>    - Bus interface A380:         PCIe 4.0 x8 and for >=A580: PCIe 4.0
>>>>    x16
>>>>
>>>> That is, the keyword here seems to be PCIe 4.0 bus speed as a
>>>> requirement to utilize the Arc A380 GPU for HWA AV1 encoding (maybe also
>>>> for other GPUs?)
>>>>
>>>
>>> well, despite so much time spend looking at dev process for mesa3d I
>>> still do not know full details and media encoder process. But isn't it like
>>> putting uncompressed frame in vram (as long as you have enough of it - so
>>> probably n raw frames between keyframe ideally?) let media engine chw on
>>> it, pull resulting compressed bitstream out of vram via pci-express?
>>>
>>> So I speculate pcie bandwidth in itself will only matter if you compress
>>> both big frame size and long keyframes, so dma engine on card must
>>> constantly pump new raw frame data via bus.
>>>
>>> I saw some mention of big (resizeable) BAR as requirement for good
>>> performance, but opengl/vulkan IMO a bit different because they send often
>>> big amount of tiny objects (vertices) via bus for each frame. But may be
>>> default 256 Mb in size bar feels a bit small for sending like 1 second of
>>> 25 4k frames (300 mb/s)?
>>>
>>
>>
>> Nothing would be better than that A380 does work with older PCIe 3.0
>> motherboards and CPUs and without too much decrease in performance.
>>
>>
>> Then I got the following reply to my support request from ASRock TSD
>> regarding
>>
>> https://www.asrock.com/Graphics-Card/Intel/Intel%20Arc%20A380%20Challenger%20ITX%206GB%20OC/index.asp
>>
>> Skylake platform does not match the system minimum requirements.
>> Please refer to the below link for further information.
>>
>> https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000091128/graphics.html
>>
>> well, if you can get card for brief (two weeks?) testing and return if it
> really does not work - it will be better than leaning on official answer,
> IMO.
>
> after all, Intel, like any company tries to sell you a bridge .....
>
>
> Yes, they always want to sell new hardware and do not want to support
> older boxes longer than required.
> So I may give it try on the new year. The point is to get av1 encoding to
> faster with gpu hwaccel, even if it seems to be limited to about 75% speed:
>
> Today I also got confirmed from MSI technical support:
>
> BIOS of Z170-A Pro MB doesn’t have Resizable (Re-Size) BAR support, the
> mainboard doesn’t support Intel Arc A380 GPU.
> For the MB that support Resizable BAR(Re-Size BAR), please find the
> Intel/AMD chipse
>
> https://www.msi.com/news/detail/MSIIsReadyToSupportResizableBARReSizeBARForNVIDIAGeForceRTX30SeriesGPUs121336
>
>
This is Reddit so take it with mountain of salt, but

https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/17pv7gu/whats_your_intel_arc_hw_av1_encoding_speeds/

==== quote ====

r/AV1 <https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/> 1 mo. ago
SeaOfTorment <https://www.reddit.com/user/SeaOfTorment/>
Whats your Intel Arc HW AV1 Encoding speeds?

Hello! I recently got an Asrock Intel Arc A380 Low Profile 6GB card and the
first thign I did when i get it, I replaced my gpu with it to test the
encoding speed, I installed all the arc drivers (Intel Driver Assistance
did everything), restarted and went to handbrake, selected screen recording
I recorded with H264 using Geforce Shadowplay, select AV1 QSYNC (or
something like that), I selected quality and the encoding speed was about
45-60, I've tested other A380s that require vga power using cable and
they've had speeds of like 140-160, what gives? I want to compare mine with
other people, currently I don't have rebar enabled and the pcie lane speed
is pcie x8 3.0, i've tested a380s with identical systems and got 140-160
just fine, I do have nvidia drivers too in the same system, but I doubt
it's that.

>
==== quote end.

And other users reported up to 250 fps on 1080p transcode. 70 fps is for 4k.

I guess this was on Windows machine.

So *may be* resizeable PCIE bar is not as hard requirement as it touted to
be?

it also interesting to see that your machine already can go quite fast with
SVT-AV1 in software mode.

{snip}

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