Intel's Ivy Bridge: An HTPC Perspective
by Ganesh T S on April 23, 2012 12:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Home Theater
- Intel
- HTPC
- Ivy Bridge
Before proceeding to the business end of the review, let us take a look at some power consumption numbers. The G.Skill ECO RAM was set to DDR3 1600 during the measurements. We measured the average power drawn at the wall under different conditions. In the table below, the Blu-ray movie from the optical disk was played using CyberLink PowerDVD 12. The Prime95 + Furmark benchmark was run for 1 hour before any measurements were taken. The MKVs were played back from a NAS attached to the network. The testbed itself was connected to a GbE switch (as was the NAS). In all cases, a wireless keyboard and mouse were connected to the testbed.
| Ivy Bridge HTPC Power Consumption | |
| Idle | 37.7 W |
| Prime95 + Furmark (Full loading) | 127.1 W |
| Blu-ray from optical drive | 57.6 W |
| 1080p24 MKV Playback (MPC-HC + QuickSync + EVR-CP) | 47.1 W |
| 1080p24 MKV Playback (MPC-HC + QuickSync + madVR) | 49.8 W |
The Ivy Bridge platform ticks all the checkboxes for the average HTPC user. 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. The QuickSync decoder and DXVA decoder are equally efficient, and essential video processing steps such as cadence detection and deinterlacing work beautifully
For advanced users, the GPU is capable of supporting madVR for most usage scenarios even with slow memory in the system. With fast, low-latency DRAM, it is even possible that madVR can be used as a renderer for the most complicated streams. More investigation needs to be carried out to check the GPU's performance under different madVR algorithms, but the initial results appear very promising.
Does this signify the end of the road for the discrete HTPC GPU? Unfortunately, that is not the case. The Ivy Bridge platform is indeed a HTPC dream come true, but it is not future proof. While Intel will end up pleasing a large HTPC audience with Ivy Bridge, there are still a number of areas which Intel seems to have overlooked:
- Despite the rising popularity of 10-bit H.264 encodes, the GPU doesn't seem to support decoding them in hardware. That said, software decoding of 1080p 10-bit H.264 is not complex enough to overwhelm the i7-3770K (but, that may not be true for the lower end CPUs).
- The video industry is pushing 4K and it makes more sense to a lot of people compared to the 3D push. 4K will see a much faster rate of adoption compared to 3D, but Ivy Bridge seems to have missed the boat here. AMD's Southern Islands as well as NVIDIA's Kepler GPUs support 4K output over HDMI, but none of the current motherboards for Ivy Bridge CPUs support 4K over HDMI.
- It is not clear whether the Ivy Bridge GPU supports decode of 4K H.264 clips. With the current drivers and LAV Filter implementation, 4K clips were decoded in software mode. This could easily be fixed through a driver / software update. In any case, without the ability to drive a 4K display, the capability would be of limited use.
Discrete HTPC GPUs are necessary only if one has plans to upgrade to 4K in the near term. Otherwise, the Ivy Bridge platform has everything that a HTPC user would ever need.
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shawkie - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
Well found! So nothing new in Ivy Bridge then...shawkie - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
Also, when we are complaining about 23.976Hz versus something like 23.972 how can you be sure that your measurement is accurate? I would think that for most HTPC users the important thing is that the video clock and audio clock are derived from a common clock. Is there some way you can check for this? I'm also interested to know if automatic lip-sync over HDMI is working properly - it doesn't seem to work on my AMD E-450.ganeshts - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
Whether the clock is accurate or not, what matters it the number of frames dropped or repeated by the renderer because of this. madVR clearly indicates this in the Statistics.Yes, you are right about video and audio clock derived from a common clock, but I am not sure on how to check for this.
Does lip sync not work for you on E-450, but does work on some other machine? I have played with the e-450 only briefly in the Zotac Zbox Nano XS, and I did watch one movie completely. I didn't have lip sync issues to warrant digging in further.. I do agree my sample set is extremely small.
shawkie - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
I agree that what matters is dropped frames. I'm not absolutely sure how madVR decides when to drop frames. As I see it there are four options1) lock playback to the video clock and drop or repeat audio frames
2) lock playback to the audio clock and drop or repeat video frames
3) lock playback to the video clock and resample the audio
4) lock playback to some other clock (maybe the processor clock) and drop or repeat both video and audio frames.
My guess its probably doing 2 which would make the reported dropped frames a good measurement. If it was doing 1 or 3 then it wouldn't drop frames. If its doing 4 then I'd argue that its a faulty renderer.
Regarding the lip sync its difficult to be very scientific about it because I don't have any suitable test material. My TV definitely introduces a significant delay and for some reason I haven't had much luck correcting it with manual adjustment on my AV receiver. Maybe it varies with frame rate or maybe the delay is outside the range I can set manually. When I enable automatic lip sync it does seem to correct things for the set top box and standalone DVD player but for my E-450 (an ASUS mini-ITX motherboard) it seems to be way off. Its quite possible its a bug in PowerDVD or that it depends on the format of the audio track or I don't know what else.
I do have machines that I could try but it would really help to have some test material in a range of frame rates and audio formats.
ghost6007 - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
This article is great commentary on the video aspects of an Intel HTPC setup however nowhere on either the processor discussions or the Z77 motherboard articles was any attempt made to actually review the audio portions of HTPC setups which is still a major part of any Home Theater.IMO if you want a complete comprehensive look at HTPC capabilities of any platform addressing such things as audio decoding, audio pass through over HDMI and audio quality are a must until then it is not a complete review.
ganeshts - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
HDMI Audio Passthrough has now become a 'commodity' feature. It is an issue in only media players now.Yes, I agree there are some other audio tests that could be done, but we had to operate within time constraints. I apologize for the same.
ghost6007 - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
I hope you guys do a more comprehensive review once these chips are available via retail or even a Ivy Bridge HTPC build.This new platform seems like an excellent candidate for a powerful low power/noise HTPC setup.
Southernsharky - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
Has there been some kind of study on HTPC users to find out what the average is?To me the big problem with this article is that it makes too many assumptions, the biggest of which is that we are all just watching videos on our tv.
I do recognize that there is a market for that, but I'm sure that I speak for most of us when I say that I hope that is just the beginning of the HTPC and not the goal.
When an integrated GPU can game at 1080p (or hopefully better... let me know. Until then my own "HTPC" will have a graphics card.
aliasfox - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
I kind of have to agree. video/audio playback maybe the *primary* function, but as my HTPC is hooked up to the biggest screen in the apartment, I wouldn't mind throwing the odd game on there.My current HTPC does (very) light gaming, overnight video transcoding, light photoshop, and the (very rare) video edit. Oh, and it plays video and audio. Please don't ask what it is.
Marlin1975 - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
Why are you testing with a HD4000? The 4000 only comes in the higher and more costly chips? Most lowwer/Mid Ivy chips will use HD2500 video.The price differance is enough to buy a cheaper chip and get a full sep. video card that has its own memory, or wait for Trinity.