Quicksync using OBS and Steam Streaming

Sweyn · January 27, 2015

First of all, Hi there LinusTech's community. I have been a lurker on this forum for quite some time now.

I have a question about Quicksync, please consider I didn't have time to experiment it at the moment since I'm not at home yet, but as an i5 4690k@4,6 ghz I am considering Streaming from time to time, not on a daily basis, otherwise I would have considered grabbing an i7, as people often say HyperThreading helps a lot, though I never actually seen some charts to testify about this effectiveness. (Sorry if my english looks weird, I'm french, yes, Le baguette.)

As I gained some intel on the Quicksync technology, it seemed to be the solution to avoid heavy workload on my cores, but the process to activate it seemed odd, I saw that you had to activate something in the bios, which is fine by me, but you also have to extend your desktop to a false monitor which appears when you activate it, and I would like to avoid that, pretty much self-explanatory as I don't want lost windows everywhere.

The thing is all the info I could get were from March 2014, is there any news on this technology ? I'm expecting Haswell and newer drivers might allow me to not do this weird manipulation everytime I want to stream.

Second question, is the new Steam streaming (not the in-home streaming, I know its supported) capable of using quicksync too ?
Final question, does multi-gpu and quicksync work together without major issues ? I'm expecting it should work fine, but you never know.

Oh, by the way, do you think I can push my Vcore to the 1,3V and try to reach 4,8 ghz and use it as a daily basis or keep it like it is right now ? If I don't see any gain in games then its pretty much not worth it for me, its mostly a gaming machine. Temperatures shouldn't be an issue, I'm using a Kraken X60 AIO watercooling.

Thanks for reading guys, hope some folks can help me out on this one !
Have a nice day.

LogicalDrm · January 28, 2015

Lets start with Quicksync. Its like you have heard, you need to enable iGPU (if disabled) from BIOS and install Intels drivers for it. After that you need to enable it from Display manager. You could do this per everytime you stream or leave it there. You can also select where the invisible screen is, so placing it top of current or below it might be best option. If you use multiple monitors and window manager (ie. DisplayFusion) this might be more problematic and turn out to be too much trouble. Like it did for me.

The way Quicksync works is, that it uses iGPU as extra core just for rendering. It takes part of workload off you CPU. AFAIK it doesn't have effect on way GPU/s perform.

I don't know about Steam so it propably doesn't use it yet. It may in future though.

As for OCing, it isn't really recommended to use 1.3V daily basis. But its still under the maxinum recommended at 1.35V. Your hardware, your choice.