Getting the Best out of an Ivy Bridge HTPC: Windows 8, madVR and More..
by Ganesh T S on January 20, 2013 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Home Theater
- Intel
- HTPC
- Ivy Bridge
- Windows 8
- Passive Cooling
HTPC Decoding and Rendering Benchmarks: EVR / EVR-CP
In our Ivy Bridge HTPC review, we had covered the CPU / GPU utilization during playback of various types of clips. In the Vision3D 252B review, we had graphs of CPU and GPU loading with various renderers and codecs. Unfortunately, AMD doesn't provide similar data / sensors for use with their APUs. Hence, we had to resort to power consumed at the wall along with GPU loading in the Trinity HTPC review. In order to keep benchmarking consistent across all HTPC reviews, we started adopting the Trinity HTPC review methodology starting with the review of the ASRock Vision HT.
The tables below present the results of running our HTPC rendering benchmark samples through various decoders when using the Enhanced Video Renderer / Enhanced Video Renderer (Custom Presenter) (EVR / EVR-CP). Entries in bold indicate that there were dropped frames which indicate that the unit wasn't up to the task for those types of streams. Fortunately, none of the streams presented any problem to the system and there were no dropped frames. The recorded values include the GPU loading and power consumed by the system at the wall when playing back the streams using MPC-HC v1.6.5.6366 and LAV Filters 0.54.
Enhanced Video Renderer (EVR)
The Enhanced Video Renderer is the default renderer made available by Windows 8. It is a lean renderer in terms of usage of system resources since most of the aspects are offloaded to the GPU drivers directly. EVR is mostly used in conjunction with native DXVA2 decoding.
| LAV Video Decoder (DXVA2 Native) + EVR | ||
| Stream | GPU Usage % | Power Consumption |
| 480i60 MPEG-2 | 24.05 | 35.04 |
| 576i50 H.264 | 21.38 | 36.06 |
| 720p60 H.264 | 26.13 | 36.6 |
| 1080i60 H.264 | 28.9 | 39.95 |
| 1080i60 MPEG-2 | 28.19 | 37.06 |
| 1080i60 VC-1 | 31.23 | 45.57 |
| 1080p60 H.264 | 30.11 | 37.09 |
The GPU is not taxed much by the EVR despite hardware decoding also taking place. Deinterlacing and other post processing aspects were left at the default settings in the Intel HD Graphics Control Panel (and these are applicable when EVR is chosen as the renderer)
Enhanced Video Renderer - Custom Presenter (EVR-CP)
EVR-CP is the default renderer used by MPC-HC. It is usually used in conjunction with MPC-HC's video decoders, some of which are DXVA-enabled. However, for our tests, we used the DXVA2 mode provided by the LAV Video Decoder.
| LAV Video Decoder (DXVA2 Native) + EVR-CP | ||
| Stream | GPU Usage % | Power Consumption |
| 480i60 MPEG-2 | 26.69 | 38.78 |
| 576i50 H.264 | 24.43 | 37.88 |
| 720p60 H.264 | 32.76 | 40.4 |
| 1080i60 H.264 | 40.16 | 42.02 |
| 1080i60 MPEG-2 | 39.75 | 41.62 |
| 1080i60 VC-1 | 40.99 | 48.45 |
| 1080p60 H.264 | 41.33 | 42 |
In addition to DXVA2 Native, we also used the QuickSync decoder developed by Eric Gur (an Intel applications engineer) and made available to the open source community. It makes use of the specialized decoder blocks available as part of the QuickSync engine in the GPU.
| LAV Video Decoder (QuickSync / DXVA2 Copy-Back) + EVR-CP | ||
| Stream | GPU Usage % | Power Consumption |
| 480i60 MPEG-2 | 27.16 | 38.42 |
| 576i50 H.264 | 25.26 | 38.05 |
| 720p60 H.264 | 36.84 | 41.6 |
| 1080i60 H.264 | 44.2 | 43.41 |
| 1080i60 MPEG-2 | 44.32 | 43.02 |
| 1080i60 VC-1 | 43.56 | 43.26 |
| 1080p60 H.264 | 48.28 | 45.13 |
In general, using the QuickSync decoder results in a higher power consumption because the decoded frames are copied back to the DRAM before being sent to the renderer. Using native DXVA decoding, the frames are directly passed to the renderer without the copy-back step. The odd-man out in the power numbers is the interlaced VC-1 clip, where QuickSync decoding is around 5W more efficient compared to 'native DXVA2'. This is because there is currently no support in the open source native DXVA2 decoders for interlaced VC-1, and hence, it is done in software [Clarification: This restriction is only on Intel GPUs. On both AMD and NVIDIA cards, DXVA2 native decode acceleration is supported for all VC-1 streams]. On the other hand, the QuickSync decoder is able to handle it with the VC-1 bitstream decoder in the GPU.
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iwayman1001 - Monday, January 21, 2013 - link
I think most if not all commenters here are completely missing the point on Jriver. Jriver can be your DLNA server, your media cloud server located in your own house. I've tried most MC software, WMC, TotalMedia, NextPVR, BeyondTV, XBMC, etc... None of them can be set up easily as media server cloud so that you can watch your live/recorded TV, all your ripped TV shows, movies, songs, etc over the Internet, your Android phones, your iPhone. You can watch your US live TV, your own movies, recorded TV shows, songs while you'r in Europe provided you have Internet access in the hotel or your smart phone. It take 5 minutes in Jriver to set that up after you build your home Jriver's media library. You do not have to know about public IP/private IP address, etc. Tryi it and you will find out all other MC servers are just for in home, not roaming on the road like Jriver provides.Monkeysweat - Monday, January 21, 2013 - link
were you using a RC candidate or last stable release (v.11)?ganeshts - Monday, January 21, 2013 - link
Frodo RC2However, I have seen the VC1 issue in previous stable builds too.
Iketh - Monday, January 21, 2013 - link
I haven't been able to respond to a post on this site for a couple months now. Can only make a new thread. I'm using IE9. When trying to reply to someone, it hangs with the working GIF twirling forever. Probably is related to the fact that I can't stay logged in from 1 page to the next either...Laststop311 - Tuesday, January 22, 2013 - link
Maybe I'm in the minority but I like an HTPC that can game as well. Yeah the htpc cases that can properly operate a full size high end gpu are bigger and louder. But with careful hardware choices and quality noctua fans you can make them nearly silent. You got to have a good furniture set up as well to make gaming with a wireless keyboard and mouse a reality. Proper high end gpu will give you better video playback in some situations as well.I can see a place for both. But I don't think ivy bridge is a good choice to jump in on the fanless htpc's. Haswell is perfectly suited for this application, power consumption lowered cpu performance and especially gpu performance increased greatly as this is a tock release which is always the best one. The Haswell version of this pc should run even cooler temps while providing better performance, especially on the gpu side (and intel better have fixed the 24hz bug)
gamoniac - Tuesday, January 22, 2013 - link
Thanks Ganesh, for comparing Win7 and Win8, and Metro vs Silverlight video rendering. I am surprised that the Netflix Metro apps are so much more efficient. Having just switched to Win8 two days ago, after reading this article, I checked and am able to confirm that on Win8, Netflix Metro app uses only 2% of my 6-core AMD 1090T CPU (on SSD), compared to the 8% of desktop IE10 browser (Silverlight), which is still better than Win7.Furthermore, the Metro Netflix app better renders in HD than in Silverlight, which periodically fails to render in HD for certain movies. Thanks again.
don_k - Tuesday, January 22, 2013 - link
I probably ask for this in just about every article in this, truly excellent, website so at the risk of becoming a broken record, could we please oh please have linux tests to go along with Windows on these things?HTPC, 'enterprise' product tests, file server type tests, all of these are simply incomplete without linux
testing without going into the reasons why as it will likely result in yet another flame war :)
I realise Linux isn't exactly your area of expertise but is it really that much more difficult to boot a linux based XBMC[1] live CD than it is to sit through yet another Windows installation?
Please consider doing this, I would love nothing more than to see Linux tests in my favourite hardware/review website.
http://mirrors.xbmc.org/releases/XBMCbuntu/xbmcbun...
ganeshts - Tuesday, January 22, 2013 - link
We definitely do Linux testing in our NAS reviews (using a CentOS guest OS). Also, my primary workplace m/c is RHEL 6 :)don_k - Monday, January 28, 2013 - link
Glad to hear it! :)So, are you going to be testing HTPCs with linux based XBMC or..?
coolhund - Tuesday, January 22, 2013 - link
Nice HTPC setup, but Windows 8? Really?How much did MS pay for that?