VP9 Decoding performance comparison? AMD vs Nvidia (vs intel GPU?)

[cloneman]

I use an nVidia GTX 1070 to help with VP9 youtube decoding in Chrome, since I have an underpowered CPU.

Especially at 4K and 8K it also makes video playback possible without dropping frames or causing very high CPU loads.

 

However, it's always an arms race for GPU video decoding as I've read many older GPUs don't support VP9 Decoding. For example the first one to support it was the GTX960, and even the GTX970/980 does NOT support it as they were released slightly before the GTX960.

 

To make matters worse some platforms like Linux and MacOS don't support it either. And Chrome has been known to break this in different versions, even on Windows. AMD GPUs apparently aren't as good until maybe you reach ~2018 GPUs.

 

 

It would be nice to get LMG to make a video on this topic. (Video Decode being above 0% is how to tell if yours is actually working during youtube playback)

 

I have an old computer that I was looking to upgrade with either a GTX960, GTX1060 or RX570 but it's difficult to know ahead of time if the AMD Decoder even works.

To make matters even worse when the industry switches to Vp9's successor we'll have to start all over again, and we're doomed to always have shitty workarounds like h264ify

 

[vanished]

Yes it's quite a problem.  After some digging by other people in response to an unusual set of results I had experienced on some lower powered hardware, I learned of a very interesting feature in Edge (the old pre-chrome one) that afaik no other browser or OS offers.  That is, if it lacks a hardware decoder, it will use the iGPU's compute power to brute force the decoding, rather than the CPU.  It's not as good as a proper decoder of course but it's a lot better than nothing and can take an N3350 from not being able to even attempt 1080p60 to doing 4K60 flawlessly.  Really hope other browsers would figure this out but I suspect they won't, and worse yet, that the newer versions of Edge will lose this feature.