Should I use Intel Media SDK for lowlatency applications?

[Guilherme_L_2]

Hello,

I work in a university project that develops a high definition videoconference software, and we are searching for options to reduce the bandwidth that our software needs in 1080p and 2160p transmissions.

Today we are using FFMPEG for encode, decode and transcode, making 1080p at 6Mbps VBR with h264. And we have a prototype that makes 2160p at 25Mbps

In 2013 we have developed a prototype library that used Intel Media SDK and we got a fine 1080p at 4Mbps. (The library uses only system memmory allocation). For some reasons, back then we have decided to put Intel Media SDK apart, and have been using FFMPEG only.

At that time I read an article that sad Intel QuickSync beneficts are not totally used when working with lowlatency applications, and I'm sure that it continues to be true. So My questions is:

Does the new broadwell and skylake integrated GPUs have improoved the Intel QuickSync performance? Does it worth to put effort in make our application to support QuickSync?

If it does, should we go with i7-5775C (Iris pro 6200) or i7-6700 (HD graphics 530), what are the beneficts of each one?

Thanks in advance.

Guilherme

[Harshdeep_B_Intel]

Hi Guilherme,

Skylake is the new 6th generation core processors, it includes enhanced Intel QuickSync advanced features with support for new DX12.0 and significant improvements over Broadwell (5th generation core processors). Using QuickSync (hardware acceleration) you can expect better and competitive performance gain over sw solution. 

I would like to suggest to go with i7-6700 (HD graphics 530). A link which provides comparative analysis b/w and Skylake and broadwell.

Let me know if you have any further questions. 

Thanks,

[Guilherme_L_2]

Hello, Harsh,

Thanks for the answer,

Do you have some ideia about results with lowlatency 1080p encode, in terms of bitrate, using broadwell or skylake?

I'm from Brazil, and It's just too hard to find sellers here for those two new models (i7-5775C and i7-6700), so do you think we can get better results than our 4 Mbps 1080p if we use DX 11 in Haswell? And then when we get an skylake model, it should be easy to us to migrate to DX 12, right?

I'm using an i7-4770 (HD graphics 4200)

Thanks in advance,

Guilherme,

[Harshdeep_B_Intel]

Hello Guilherme,

Unfortunately we don't have official lowlatency benchmarking data to share on 5th/6th gen processors . Generally, all the benchmarking data are collected with available end user apps in market, you can refer to end user apps data which have enabled to use low latency mode on skylake/Broadwell.

If your current implementation is DX9 on Haswell. Then definitely, I suggest upgrading to DX11 implementation, provided you have Win8/8.1 with latest drivers installed to achieve better performance results. Yes, migrating to 6th generation processors with DX12 should provide competitive performance results over previous gen processors.

Thanks,