Intel's Haswell - An HTPC Perspective: Media Playback, 4K and QuickSync Evaluated
by Ganesh T S on June 2, 2013 8:15 PM ESTVideo Post Processing and HTPC Configuration Options
Our HTPC reviews over the last few years have used the HQV 2.0 benchmark to estimate and compare video post processing quality of the GPUs. We are at a stage where almost all GPUs end up scoring around 200, leaving very little differentiation. Put bluntly, the HQV 2.0 benchmark is dated, and presenting scores from it delivers no practical value to readers. That said, the tests themselves are relevant, but, instead of the HQV 2.0 Blu-ray, we used clips from Spears & Munsil's HD Benchmark (2nd Edition).
Intel has been paying particular attention to video post processing (courtesy of the pressure put by AMD's high scores in the HQV benchmark during the Sandy Bridge era). Haswell manages to clear common deinterlacing, chroma upsampling and cadence detection tests without issues, as shown in the gallery below
The disappointment comes in the form of the revamped Intel Graphics Control Panel. While the changes in appearance can be excused as migrating to be friendly with the Windows 8 touchscreen devices, the distribution of the various configuration options makes no sense at all. For example, it is only fair for users to expect the 'inverse telecine' option to be present under the Video category. However, it makes its appearance under the advanced display settings. Input range (Full / Limited for 0 - 255 / 16 - 235) is under advanced video settings, but the YCbCr / RGB setting is under the Display settings. It would make sense to have both settings under one category as users usually modify both when trying to calibrate and ensure that their setup is working optimally.
As I found out when trying to calibrate using Spears & Munsil's HD Benchmark, the mixture of settings in the control panel makes it very difficult to calibrate the correct output color space (amongst other things). For example, there is no way to choose YCbCr 4:2:2 / YCbCr 4:4:4 / Limited RGB / Full RGB. This is just one of the missing features in the configuration utility. I hope Intel's engineers try to calibrate a few displays by driving them using an Intel GPU and using the HD Benchmark 2nd Edition calibration disk (just to understand how badly the layout of the control panel is designed).
Andrew at Missing Remote also brings out the fact that clipping issues still exist. In addition, the current control panel completely removes the ability to create custom resolutions (in any case, the previous feature was also not very user friendly compared to NVIDIA's solution). The drivers and UI / UX still need work, but Intel hasn't been as responsive as we would like (partly due to the fact that casual HTPC users don't really care about these issues).
Note of Thanks:
Thanks to Spears & Munsil / Oppo Digital for providing us with an evaluation version of the HD Benchmark 2nd Edition Blu-ray
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eio - Sunday, June 23, 2013 - link
great example! very interesting.I agree with Montage that for most snapshots, HD4600 is significantly better than HD4000 for retaining much more texture, even for this frame 4 in 1080p.
but in 720p HD4600 shows its trade off of keep more fine grained texture: looks like HD4600 are regressed in low contrast, large scale structral infomation.
as you said, this type of regression can be more evident in video than snapshots.
eio - Sunday, June 23, 2013 - link
another thing that surprises me is: x264 is a clear loser in this test. I don't understand why, what are the specific params that handbrake used to call x264?nevcairiel - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
@ganeshtsI'm curious, what did you use for DXVA2N testing of VC-1?
LAV Video doesn't support VC-1 DXVA2 on Intel, at least on Ivy Bridge, and i doubt Haswell changed much (although it would be a nice surprise, i'll see for myself in a few days)
ganeshts - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
Hendrik,I made a note that DXVA2N for interlaced VC-1 has software fallback.
That issue is still not fixed in Haswell. That is why you see QuickSync consuming lower power compared to DXVA2N for the interlaced VC-1 sample.
zilexa - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
To be honest, now that I have a near-perfect Raspberry setup, I would never buy a Core ix/AMD Ax HTPC anymore. Huge waiste of money for almost un-noticable image quality improvement.The Raspberry Pi will use max 6.5w, usually much lower. Speed in XBMC is no issue anymore, and it plays back all my movies just fine (Batman imax x264 rip 7-15MBps). I play mostly downloaded tv shows, streams and occasionally a movie. It also takes care of the whole download process in the background. So I don't even have a computer anymore at home. I sold my old AMD 780G based Silverstone M2 HTPC for €170 and it was the best decision ever.
Still cool to read about the high end possibilities of HTPC/MadVR or actually just video playback and encoding, cos thats what this is really about. But I would never buy a system to be able to support this. HTPC in my opinion is to be in a lazy mode and able to playback your shows/movies/watch your photos and streams in good HD quality and audio.
If you need HTPC, in my opinion there is no need for such an investment in a computer system which is meant for a huge variety of computing tasks.
jwcalla - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
It's going to depend on individual needs of course, and I think your Raspberry Pi is on the other end of the extreme, but otherwise I kind of have the same reaction. This has got to be an $800+ build here for an HTPC and then I begin to wonder if this is a practical approach.Owing to the fact that Intel's entire marketing strategy is to oversell to the consumer (i.e., sell him much more than he really needs), it seems that sometimes these reviews follow the strategy too closely. For an HTPC? Core i3 at the max. And even that's being generous. If one needs certain workloads like transcoding and such then maybe a higher end box is needed. But then I question if that kind of stuff is appropriate for an HTPC.
superjim - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
Playback a raw M2TS 1080p 60fps file on your Pi and get back to me.phoenix_rizzen - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
How did you get around the "interface is not accelerated" issue on the RPi? I found it completely useless when trying to navigate the XBMC interface itself (you know, to select the show to watch). Sure, once the video was loaded, and processing moved over to the hardware decoder, things ran smooth as silk.I sold my RPi two weeks after receiving it due to this issue. Just wasn't worth the headaches. Since moved to a quad-core AthlonII running off an SSD with a fanless nVidia dGPU. So much nicer to work with.
vlado08 - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
What about Frame Rate Conversion (FRC) capability?ericgl21 - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
Ganesh,Let's assume you have two 4K/60p video files playing in a loop at the same time for a duration of 3 hours.
Is it possible that Iris or Iris Pro could play those two video streams at the same time, without dropping frames and without the processor throttling throughout the entire movie playback ?
I mean, connecting two 4K TVs, one to the HDMI port and the other to the DisplayPort, and outputting each video to each TV. Would you say the Iris / Iris Pro is up to this task? Could you test this scenario?