The Haswell Review: Intel Core i7-4770K & i5-4670K Tested

Quick Sync Performance

With more graphics EUs under the hood of all desktop Haswells (at least those launching today), Quick Sync performance improves a bit over Ivy Bridge. Intel claims to have focused heavily on improving the quality of Quick Sync transcodes however in my testing I saw a slight regression in quality. I didn’t have a ton of time to dig further to find out what’s going on but I plan on doing so post-Computex. Update: It looks like I wasn't alone in seeing an image quality regression. Haswell QSV image quality is worse than on IVB as Ganesh found.

The other big news is Handbrake now officially supports Quick Sync, something Ganesh will be testing with his HTPC look at Haswell.

Needless to say, Quick Sync performance is better on Haswell than on Ivy Bridge. And it’s even better if you happen to have a Haswell with a 128MB L4 cache.