Gadgetory

x264 Quick Sync video and VNC vce there is no shortage of ways to transform your screen into a video stream visible to potentially millions of people around the world for the mad ballers among us a second PC dedicated to that task is the undisputed king of performance and quality but how did the rest of us get our streams going without crossing them up AMD claims to have the best solution but do they welcome to a new episode of manufacturers say Brow's privately and securely with tunnel bear the simple VPN app try tunnel bear for free at the link in the video description one of AMD's top marketing points is that the 16 threads in their rise in seven CPUs allow gamers to dedicate ample CPU resources to both gaming and video streaming coding without impacting the performance of either since games won't make use of all 16 threads and neither will an encoder meanwhile one of intel selling points for their consumer level chips is their integrated graphics processor and its ability to use Quick Sync video technology to encode a video stream without impacting the performance of their CPU well that all sounds great but with both of them claiming to achieve the same objective by very different means well surely one of them's got to be better right well predictably enough AMD says that their way software encoding is superior and the traditional wisdom would back them up on this one the software based x264 encoder is well-known to offer higher image quality and more flexibility in its setup compared to other solutions but until now if you cared about performance you'd almost never use it while gaming because its consumption of system resources was pretty much guaranteed to impact your gameplay unless you were running an extreme edition or something like that but with more processing cores that rise in sevens disposal it could be that AMD's onto something meanwhile what are the other guys doing different here Intel's Quick Sync video and for that matter Nvidia's NV e and c & RT G's Radeon video codec engine are all what are known as dedicated hardware based encoders which present an interesting conundrum in the eery you actually stand to lose virtually no performance which is cool but you're forced to use the optimized settings that are baked into the hardware meaning that you can't really tune anything beyond their presets besides simply increasing the raw bitrate to improve quality so finally back to the big questions how much does the encoder matter for quality is Twitch's new maximum of 6 megabits per second enough that it won't really matter anymore are any of these solutions really able to untether you from the second PC and let you stream without impacting performance well we touched on this from AMD's perspective in our Rison 7 review which you can check out here and we asked you guys at that time if you wanted something more in depth and since you did ask so nicely your wish is our command we're going to focus on two games for our testing first ashes of the singularity's cpu benchmark not because it's a hot game on twitch right now but for technical reasons it stresses the CPU and has a good mix of slow-moving terrain with lots of small fast-moving projectiles that are great at introducing blocky artifacts during encoding the second will be the for honor benchmark with its sweeping cameras and loads of special effects we know again most people aren't streaming these games but canned benches are much more repeatable across our platforms and both of these titles represent a realistic gaming load that is more demanding than today's popular eSports titles for our encoders we've used common twitch streaming bit rates and resolutions for all of our comparisons you'll note that 1080p 30 is technically more data to cram into our lower bit rates than 720p 60 but the higher frame rate of 720p 60 should better highlight motion artifacts in our encoders so any CPU even one with onboard graph can use x264 encoding but we observed in our testing that not all are created equal in this regard we found that AMD's Rison 7 managed to hood hmm I just snuck up on me managed to avoid dropping frames throughout our testing at a higher quality preset than either of Team Blue solutions in some cases even some of our Hardware encoders needed lower presets so to find out how these differences in encoding settings affect real-world image quality we captured a lossless reference recording with our Blackmagic intensity Pro and used it for comparison so we can see some subtle differences here Rison manages to retain smaller details that get smeared out on Team Blue at their very fast and superfast settings compared to rhizomes faster this not only translates into better picture quality overall but also contributes to better quality when twitch then re encodes it for its various quality options moving on here we see our hardware encoders at 1080 30p at 2500 kilobit per second alongside our Rison x264 footage of the four x264 on Verizon appears to be the least likely to lose small projectiles in ashes of the benchmark NV and C and quick sync don't seem half bad here to be clear but they do block up more often and lose finer details when a lots going on at once Artie G's AMF encoder on the other hand sorry Radeon fans but huh things get more interesting again at 720p 60 x264 holds up best once more although the shimmering of compression artifacts on the cobblestones as the camera flies by is pretty noticeable but not nearly as noticeable as it is with the rest of our contestants NV NC is again at the head of the hardware pack looking decent but our quick say and amf footage are both abysmal at times blocking up so badly as to appear as though they'd been recorded at 240p instead of 720p we'll keep our visual comparisons rolling while we move on to performance with x264 we see a respectable showing from our risin 7 1800 X averaging about a 5 to 10% performance penalty on the faster and very fast presets over our baseline reading on the 6900 K meanwhile we get an average of a roughly 3 to 23 percent performance drop clearly a much more varied result while our 7700 K could get as high as a 36 percent hit both of these ones on the superfast preset AMD's high-speed Infiniti fabric interconnect secret sauce for rise ins video encoding wild gaming performance looks like it's working so far our hardware tests meanwhile show rise in actually taking a wider hit with envy EMC at roughly 5 to 15 percent on average while our 6900 k managed a 3 to 10 percent variance and our 7700 k ranged from 2 to 18% RTGS amf encoder seemed to hit all of our chips less with Rison taking our roughly 7 to 8 percent performance hit and sitting in between the other two though as we've seen the AMF encoder is also far from the highest quality for streaming but we have one final encoder one that we can't directly compare with any other CPU and that's Intel's Quick Sync video compared to the 7700 k's baseline it caused a three to twelve percent performance drop about in line with the rest of our hardware encoder z' so finally then lining all our encoders up next to each other we can see that actually rise in running x264 blows the doors off every other CPU and coder combination it has a tight variation in its performance impact over our baseline numbers and it handles a higher quality CPU preset meaning that when twitch Rhian codes you lose less detail overall so taken together it looks like AMD's marketing department wasn't asleep at the wheel on this one Squarespace takes the hassle of building a website for your small business for your portfolio for the for the sports team that you help run and it throws it all in the garbage because Squarespace is super easy to use it's only 12 bucks a month to start you get a free domain if you by Squarespace for a year they offer 24/7 support via live chat and email and all you pretty much got to do you might not even need it is pick one of their gorgeous templates put 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