RTX 20XX h264/h265 compression : impact on CPU?

Larry Philips · July 28, 2020

Hi,

If anyone tried h264/h265 compression with their GPU (using Handbrake), could you please tell me : does it decrease CPU usage?

Thanks

Samfisher · July 28, 2020

Of course. It will still use a little bit of your CPU, but most of the work will be done on the GPU. Unless you play with the settings, GPU encode will usually look worse than a similar settings on CPU encode.

Mateyyy · July 28, 2020

Yes, it's also quite a lot quicker, at least with my components.

Larry Philips · July 28, 2020

1 hour ago, Samfisher said:

Of course. It will still use a little bit of your CPU, but most of the work will be done on the GPU. Unless you play with the settings, GPU encode will usually look worse than a similar settings on CPU encode.

How much worse?

I have quite a lot of footage shot with a Black Magic camera (quite high quality, with high bit-rate) that I know I won't use in any project, but want to keep for personal memory / archive.

I can trade off some quality for a significant gain of space on my hard drives.

I'll probably choose h265, maybe the quality loss is less than with h264?

Or should I just postpone my new computer purchase and wait to see if the next generation GPUs will include the forthcoming h266 encoder/decoder ?

Samfisher · July 29, 2020

14 hours ago, Larry Philips said:

How much worse?

I have quite a lot of footage shot with a Black Magic camera (quite high quality, with high bit-rate) that I know I won't use in any project, but want to keep for personal memory / archive.

I can trade off some quality for a significant gain of space on my hard drives.

I'll probably choose h265, maybe the quality loss is less than with h264?

Or should I just postpone my new computer purchase and wait to see if the next generation GPUs will include the forthcoming h266 encoder/decoder ?

Quality can be good or better if you set a target bitrate and/or size and play with the settings to push quality higher. Turing HEVC is more efficient and better quality than H.264 even at the Slow Preset. You gotta try out a few clips to find the sweet spot for you.