Intel's Haswell - An HTPC Perspective: Media Playback, 4K and QuickSync Evaluated

Concluding Remarks

The Haswell platform ticks all the checkboxes for the mainstream HTPC user. It fixes some nagging bugs left behind in Ivy Bridge. Setting up MPC-HC with LAV Filters was a walk in the park. With good and stable support for DXVA2 APIs in the drivers, even softwares like XBMC can take advantage of the GPU's capabilities. Essential video processing steps such as chroma upsampling, cadence detection and deinterlacing work beautifully. For advanced users, the GPU is capable of supporting madVR for most usage scenarios even with DDR3-1600 memory in the system.

Admittedly, there doesn't seem to be much improvement in madVR capabilities over the HD4000 in Ivy Bridge. The madVR developer has also added more complicated algorithms to the mix and made further refinements to existing ones (such as the anti-ringing filter). The improvements in the Intel GPU capabilities haven't kept up with the requirements of these updates. That said, madVR with DXVA2 scaling works well and looks good, satifying some of the HTPC users who have moved to it from the default renderers. We could certainly complain about some missing driver features and the lack of hardware decode capabilities for 10b H.264 streams. HEVC (H.265) decode acceleration is absent too. However, let us be reasonable and accept the fact that despite  anime's adoption of 10b H.264 in a big way, it is yet to gain mass-market appeal. HEVC was standardized pretty recently, and Haswell's GPU would have long been past the design stage by that time. To further Intel's defense, neither NVIDIA nor AMD support these two features.

Talking of display refresh rate support, Intel has finally fixed the 23.976 Hz bug which has been plaguing Intel-based HTPCs since 2008. This is going to make HTPC enthusiasts really happy. The fact that Intel manages the best match for the required refresh rate compared to AMD and NVIDIA cards is just icing on the cake. The 4K H.264 decode and output support from Haswell seems very promising for the 4K ecosystem. It also strengthens H.264's relevance for some time to come in the 4K arena.

The biggest disappointment with Haswell in the media department is the regression in QuickSync video transcode quality. The salt in the wound is really Intel's claims before launch of significant increases in QS video quality. Ivy Bridge definitely produces better quality QSV accelerated video transcodes.  Combine that with a lack of significant progress on the software support side until recently (hooray for Handbrake, boo for no substantial OS X deployment) and you'd almost get the impression that Intel was trying its best to ruin one of the most promising features of its Core microprocessors. Haswell doesn't ruin QuickSync, the technology is still a great way of getting your content quickly transcoded for use on mobile devices. However, in its current implementation, Haswell does absolutely nothing to further QuickSync - in fact, it's a definitely step in the wrong direction.

The low power consumption of the Haswell system makes it ideal for HTPC builds, and we are very bullish on the NUC as well as the capabilities of completely passive builds as HTPC platforms. Our overall conclusion is that Haswell takes discrete GPUs out of the equation for a vast majority of HTPC users. The few who care about advanced madVR scaling algorithms (such as Jinc and the anti-ringing filters for Lanczos) may need to fork out for a discrete GPU, but even those will probably be of the higher end variety rather than the entry level GT 640s and AMD 7750s that we have been suggesting so far.