4K video playback without dedicated graphics card

[Stonelesscutter]

So I've had this nice 55 inch 4K Samsung TV sitting in my living room for about 4 months now and I would like to make some use of those 4K capabilities. Problem is, almost every time I start a video (in VLC Player) on the mini PC which is hooked up to it, it chokes. I'm talking about MKV files of around the 4 to 6 GB range, which are really at the low end of the spectrum for 4K video. When we purchased this mini PC, we specifically looked for 4K and it said it was suitable. Sure enough, it is connected to the TV through its mini displayport and on the TV I get the Windows desktop in all its 4K glory. It's just when trying to play those videos that I experience problems. All of this is just some back story though.

 

What I've been wondering, is what you would need in a computer in order to be able to play those 4K MKV files properly and without any stuttering. And I don't mean just these low-end 4K MKV files, but also the high end files of say 50 to 100 GB. Can this be done on a computer which doesn't have any dedicated graphics card? If so, what kind of CPU would be required at minimum in order to be able to handle this?

 

I've been looking for information about this for quite a while now, but I have not been able to turn up anything useful. I'm hoping someone here will have the knowledge and experience to answer these questions.

 

Would be awesome if LTT team could run a test on this using the various CPUs they have at hand to see if a threshold can be determined.

[Enderman]

What are the specs of the PC............

[Stonelesscutter]

4 minutes ago, Enderman said:

What are the specs of the PC............

That is exactly what I'm asking really. I haven't built the PC yet, so I'm looking for what I would need to be able to do it. Just ignore the mini PC I mentioned, I will be replacing that with an actually decent custom built one. At the moment, I've seen a Ryzen 7 2700X CPU for sale on Amazon for only 150 pounds, which seems like a pretty sweet deal to me. I'm waiting for the Ryzen 4000 series to arrive however, to see how that compares to the 2000 and 3000 series. Possibly by that time the Ryzen 7 3700X would be available for about the same price as the Ryzen 7 2700X currently is. So, would for example the Ryzen 7 2700X be able to do the 4K MKV playback all by itself, without having an additional dedicated graphics card? I believe this CPU doesn't come with built-in GPU units, so it would be purely doing it with the basic cores. It has 8 cores though.

[PineyCreek]

3 minutes ago, Stonelesscutter said:

That is exactly what I'm asking really. I haven't built the PC yet, so I'm looking for what I would need to be able to do it. Just ignore the mini PC I mentioned, I will be replacing that with an actually decent custom built one. At the moment, I've seen a Ryzen 7 2700X CPU for sale on Amazon for only 150 pounds, which seems like a pretty sweet deal to me. I'm waiting for the Ryzen 4000 series to arrive however, to see how that compares to the 2000 and 3000 series. Possibly by that time the Ryzen 7 3700X would be available for about the same price as the Ryzen 7 2700X currently is. So, would for example the Ryzen 7 2700X be able to do the 4K MKV playback all by itself, without having an additional dedicated graphics card? I believe this CPU doesn't come with built-in GPU units, so it would be purely doing it with the basic cores. It has 8 cores though.

2700X isn't an APU; it doesn't have an integrated GPU, so no.  You will need a GPU on top of that.

[Jurrunio]

Athlon 200GE should be sufficient, Vega iGPUs in these APUs can already decode 4K60 content. MKV's probably encoded with h264, which they can decode. Just make sure the board has enough display outputs you need.

 

3 minutes ago, Stonelesscutter said:

That is exactly what I'm asking really. I haven't built the PC yet, so I'm looking for what I would need to be able to do it. Just ignore the mini PC I mentioned, I will be replacing that with an actually decent custom built one. At the moment, I've seen a Ryzen 7 2700X CPU for sale on Amazon for only 150 pounds, which seems like a pretty sweet deal to me. I'm waiting for the Ryzen 4000 series to arrive however, to see how that compares to the 2000 and 3000 series. Possibly by that time the Ryzen 7 3700X would be available for about the same price as the Ryzen 7 2700X currently is. So, would for example the Ryzen 7 2700X be able to do the 4K MKV playback all by itself, without having an additional dedicated graphics card? I believe this CPU doesn't come with built-in GPU units, so it would be purely doing it with the basic cores. It has 8 cores though.

You still need a graphics card, without a GPU you cant see anything on your monitor. 

[johnt]

26 minutes ago, Stonelesscutter said:

Would be awesome if LTT team could run a test on this using the various CPUs they have at hand to see if a threshold can be determined.

It would, except most people do not have access to 50 GB to 100 GB MKV files 

 

I suspect the issue is to make sure you are running GPU rendering, otherwise the software is expecting your CPU to handle the full load. I don't recall what capacity VLC has to support GPU rendering.

 

I personally use MPC-BE on my HTPC with a GTX1050ti. The PC has 8 GB memory and a Pentium G4400 and I have zero issues with 4k resolution streaming or MKVs.

 

I built it in like 2015/2016 and I still see no reason to upgrade.

[Stonelesscutter]

16 minutes ago, PineyCreek said:

2700X isn't an APU; it doesn't have an integrated GPU, so no.  You will need a GPU on top of that.

Thanks! So I guess the new question now will be, what would be the minimum processor (with integrated GPU) required to be able to handle those 4K MKV files, without an additional graphics card.

15 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

Athlon 200GE should be sufficient, Vega iGPUs in these APUs can already decode 4K60 content. MKV's probably encoded with h264, which they can decode. Just make sure the board has enough display outputs you need.

 

You still need a graphics card, without a GPU you cant see anything on your monitor. 

That is a good point. Why didn't I realize that!  I guess I've gotten so used to having pre-built systems (mainly laptops) that I forgot.

14 minutes ago, JohnT said:

It would, except most people do not have access to 50 GB to 100 GB MKV files 

 

I suspect the issue is to make sure you are running GPU rendering, otherwise the software is expecting your CPU to handle the full load. I don't recall what capacity VLC has to support GPU rendering.

 

I personally use MPC-BE on my HTPC with a GTX1050ti. The PC has 8 GB memory and a Pentium G4400 and I have zero issues with 4k resolution streaming or MKVs.

 

I built it in like 2015/2016 and I still see no reason to upgrade.

In VLC I could only find the option "Hardware-accelerated decoding", which is set to "Automatic". I don't know if this is in regard to GPU rendering, but it's the only thing I think it could be.

 

I ran dxdiag on the mini PC and it is apparently using an Intel Core i3-5005U processor with 4 CPUs at 2.00 GHz. According to Intel however, the chip has only 2 cores and 4 threads. Apparently it has integrated Intel® HD Graphics 5500. The mini PC also has 8 GB of RAM. I suppose I can conclude from this that Intel® HD Graphics 5500 is simply not up to the task of decoding 4K content efficiently enough.

[Stonelesscutter]

I also guess this means that I won't be able to start with the build I had intended, by for example using the Ryzen 7 2700X and then add a dedicated graphics card perhaps a couple of months down the line, as I would have no video output. That kinda stinks, because I recently looked at the specs for all the 2nd and 3rd gen Ryzen processors, and almost none of them (except for a few very basic models) have integrated GPUs. But I don't want those basic models, because I also intend to use the system for some gaming later on. I don't need top of the line specs for that, but something around mid-range would be the least I'd want. Conclusion, I will have to fork out cash for a motherboard, CPU, RAM, graphics card and storage space, all at the same time. That's a bummer. I was hoping to spread out the expenditures.

[Enderman]

You can get a used i5 or i7 for pretty cheap.

Those will work fine for 4k video.

[Stonelesscutter]

10 minutes ago, Enderman said:

You can get a used i5 or i7 for pretty cheap.

Those will work fine for 4k video.

 

Would I be correct to assume that it would have to be one of the Intel processors with the following sort of integrated graphics? (information coming from Wikipedia)

 

[Enderman]

8 minutes ago, Stonelesscutter said:

 

Would I be correct to assume that it would have to be one of the Intel processors with the following sort of integrated graphics? (information coming from Wikipedia)

 

Yeah, most intel CPUs come with iGPUs.

[Jurrunio]

27 minutes ago, Stonelesscutter said:

I also guess this means that I won't be able to start with the build I had intended, by for example using the Ryzen 7 2700X and then add a dedicated graphics card perhaps a couple of months down the line, as I would have no video output. That kinda stinks, because I recently looked at the specs for all the 2nd and 3rd gen Ryzen processors, and almost none of them (except for a few very basic models) have integrated GPUs. But I don't want those basic models, because I also intend to use the system for some gaming later on. I don't need top of the line specs for that, but something around mid-range would be the least I'd want. Conclusion, I will have to fork out cash for a motherboard, CPU, RAM, graphics card and storage space, all at the same time. That's a bummer. I was hoping to spread out the expenditures.

AMD's 4000 series APU is a thing, but release for desktop is unclear.

[Stonelesscutter]

4 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Yeah, most intel CPUs come with iGPUs.

Well, this mini PC apparently uses a "BESSTAR Tech VB9" motherboard. Whatever that is, I'm guessing it won't be able to support Intel processors of the generations 8 and upwards, which I would apparently need for integrated 4K decoding. I feel like such a sucker for not looking into this more closely before we purchased this thing. We bought it only 4 months ago, during Black Friday. It was an impulse buy. In my defense, my wife picked it out and only gave me about one hour (while I was at work) to say yes or no to it.

[Stonelesscutter]

1 minute ago, Jurrunio said:

AMD's 4000 series APU is a thing, but release for desktop is unclear.

Yeah, it seems like we may even have to wait until around September or October for the 4000 series desktop CPUs to arrive.

[Thanatopsis]

Here is some extra info for you on intel cpu's with igp, they all have dedicated asic's on the igp to handle decoding h.264 natively so that they dont stress the igp or cpu with that. The down side is that Intel to keep costs in size and design time has generally kept the asic's smallish which limits the capabilities that they have.  When you see a h.264 decode res intel is only talking about that asic.

 

AMD with its APU's have been able to decode 4k h.264 for a while even with their bulldozer based APU's due to better built in gpu tech.

 

A 3000 series Ryzen APU is going to work well for your needs.

[Stonelesscutter]

I've taken the liberty of putting AMD's Ryzen processors in a sheet with information taken from the AMD website. I've looked up PassMark scores for each and included it in the file. There were two processors which didn't have a dedicated PassMark score though, so those are at the bottom of the sheet. It's possible that information for the Ryzen™ 5 1600 (AF) has gotten mixed into the scores for the Ryzen™ 5 1600 on the PassMark site, so I'm not sure how reliable that rating is. The same goes for the AMD Ryzen™ 5 2600E and AMD Ryzen™ 5 2600 processors. In the file, the processors which have integrated GPU capabilities are marked in yellow highlights. The sheet has two tabs, one which has the processors sorted by the highest average score and one which has them sorted by the highest single thread score.

 

For the processors which include GPU capabilities, the highest scoring models are the Ryzen™ 5 3400GE and the Ryzen™ 5 3400G, depending on whether you look at highest average score or highest single thread score.

 

Model / Average score / Single thread score

Ryzen™ 5 3400G / 9644 / 2254 ($149.99)

Ryzen™ 5 3400GE / 10263 / 2091

 

Upon comparing these scores to those of the models which don't include GPU capabilities, there is a considerable gap in performance when it comes to multi-threaded processing, although admittedly not as big of a gap in single-threaded processing.

 

Model / Average score / Single thread score

Ryzen™ 7 1700X / 15470 / 1969 ($269.98)

Ryzen™ 7 2700X / 17934 / 2303 ($259.00)

Ryzen™ 7 3700X / 22811 / 2503 ($298.99)

 

The prices mentioned above were taken from PC Part Picker, but I know the 2700X is available through Amazon UK for only £150.

 

For me, the difference in performance between the CPUs with integrated graphics and those without is enough reason to go for a processor without integrated graphics, especially considering that I want to add a dedicated graphics card anyway.

AMD processors.xlsx