4K60 FPS VP9 decoding performance

[Carfax83]

I'm not sure what is 100% normal since I don't have the downstream to watch 2160p60 videos on YouTube, although I upload in that format to my channel.

I'm pretty sure I've watched plenty of 1440p60 videos without any dropped frames, but I can't be for certain, and while I'd test again right now, I'm in the middle of uploading a few large videos to YouTube so my connection is limited. I imagine a dropped frame here or there could just be a small glitch that happens from time to time (e.g. while switching the quality of the video), and if there's no noticeable stuttering I probably wouldn't think anything of it.

Tried it again after clearing the cache, and it fixed the problem. Now no dropped frames at all :thumbsup:

As for the 8K video, that played very smoothly with no dropped frames either. CPU was in the mid to upper 30s mostly..

 

[Carfax83]

I only had 2 dropped frames, which probably had to do with the transition to 4K60. Plays really smoothly on my G4400 @ 4.455Ghz, and a 7950 3GB card, on a 1080P HDMI HDTV/monitor. It was showing my connection needed 29.5Mbit/sec down, it was really maxing my connection. (I have 25/25 internet, which works out to 30/30.)

CPU usage on my dual-core was pretty maxed out though, like 95+% usage. Waterfox 47.0 64-bit on Win7 64-bit SP1.

Edit: No lag or stutters, that I could see.

Contrary to what I thought earlier, it seems that Firefox has a more efficient implementation of the libVPX decoder than Chrome. Did you try the 8K video?

 

[Carfax83]

The first video the op posted plays perfectly fine for me. The 8k video I will give a shot now. Yup, that played perfectly fine as well. I am running a 4790k with a gtx 1080 with a 150mbps internet connection. I didn't have any issues.

GTX 1080 has full VP9 hardware acceleration, so you're golden

If you check your CPU usage during the playback, it should be minimal.

 

[mnewsham]

So in Firefox I can get 4k playing smoothly with 4% CPU use and 30% GPU use. However when trying to playback 8k it just has the loading circle on as if it were buffering, even after it buffers the entire video, it just never starts playing. I assume it's something about the GTX 960 and it being such a high resolution? Or maybe just a browser thing.

 

[SPBHM]

make sure you are running 4K60 and not 4K30, I think 4K60 is only supported on Chrome
also right click the video and "stats for nerds" or something to see if it's using VP9

 

[imported_bman]

Looking at Chrome://gpu I am getting a general error for VP9: HW video decode not available for profile 12

So it looks like Skylake is still using CPU decode in Chrome.

 

[mnewsham]

Looking at Chrome://gpu I am getting a general error for VP9: HW video decode not available for profile 12

So it looks like Skylake is still using CPU decode in Chrome.

So forcing GPU acceleration in chrome and I can get 4k working with about 10% CPU usage and 15-30% GPU usage. However, switching to 8k seems to run it all off the CPU and ignores the GPU again. Hmmm.

 

[therealnickdanger]

Here is an 8k video if anyone wants to give that a shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLprVF6d7Ug

Nice! I just tested it at work with my BEAST machine* and it dropped frames like crazy. 295/598 frames dropped before I gave up. 99% CPU utilization. It was probably that 1% that kept me from enjoying it.





*circa 2008
Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz
4GB RAM
ATI Radeon 3450

 

[2is]

Here is an 8k video if anyone wants to give that a shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLprVF6d7Ug

My 5820k hits around 60-75% usage at some parts of that video, it was stutter free except for a few transitional scenes where it dropped a frame or two.

I have a GTX 960 but it doesn't look like chrome is using it, sitting at 12% usage.

I wasn't able to get that to play perfectly on my sig machine, but firefox did play it a whole lot better then Chrome with about 25% of the dropped frames as Chrome.

 

[sm625]

Streaming 4K video is just nuts... I have 75mbit internet and almost every site, youtube, vudu, netflix, hulu, amazon, they all occasionally pause to buffer in the middle of playback. And this is mostly jsut 480p content, maybe some 720p. In 2016! It is so frickin annoying that I often just go to watchseries and download the files so I can watch them without all these issues. I dont even care that much about quality, I jsut want it to frickin work. The idea of 4k streaming is just absurdly laughable.

 

[2is]

Streaming 4K video is just nuts... I have 75mbit internet and almost every site, youtube, vudu, netflix, hulu, amazon, they all occasionally pause to buffer in the middle of playback. And this is mostly jsut 480p content, maybe some 720p. In 2016! It is so frickin annoying that I often just go to watchseries and download the files so I can watch them without all these issues. I dont even care that much about quality, I jsut want it to frickin work. The idea of 4k streaming is just absurdly laughable.

Honestly that sounds like an issue on your or your ISP's end more then anything. I have zero issues streaming 480/720/1080 and use nowhere near a sustained 75mbit. Only at the very beginning does streaming anything at all, even 4k does my bandwidth get saturated, that's only for the first few seconds, then it's just bursts of data after that with no additional buffering required.

 

[mnewsham]

Streaming 4K video is just nuts... I have 75mbit internet and almost every site, youtube, vudu, netflix, hulu, amazon, they all occasionally pause to buffer in the middle of playback. And this is mostly jsut 480p content, maybe some 720p. In 2016! It is so frickin annoying that I often just go to watchseries and download the files so I can watch them without all these issues. I dont even care that much about quality, I jsut want it to frickin work. The idea of 4k streaming is just absurdly laughable.

I have 150/150 and youtube was only using ~95mbps to buffer. It was no delay though really and no waiting on the buffering. I'd have thought 75mbps would at least only require 5-10 seconds to allow enough buffering for smooth playback.

 

[Soulkeeper]

No ffVP9 is a separate decoder. Here's one of the developers of ffVP9's blog.

He does some tests comparing libVPX to ffVP9. Now granted this was in 2014, so the performance metrics have definitely changed since then. How much, I don't know, but Google has certainly done a lot of performance improvements for libVPX during that time.

/var/log/packages/ffmpeg-3.0-x86_64_custom-1:usr/bin/ffplay

The binary ships with ffmpeg on my system, uses the ffmpeg libs and is maintained by the same people. It's also dynamically linked to libvpx.

 

[linkgoron]

My 6700k @ 4.5ghz lost 0 frames in the 4k60fps video, tested for ~1 minute. CPU usage was around 40%-45%.

The 8k video was a bit harsher, 133/3761 dropped frames with usage between 60%-70%.

The above was using Chrome.

 

[sm625]

It uses 80% of my i7 4790 with integrated graphics and drops frames like crazy.

This is where you have to throw in the towel and say that a piece of software is just garbage.

 

[dtgoodwin]

My G3258@4.7 Ghz using onboard graphics showed 100% utilization and about 1/3 dropped frames. My ISP connection is 55 Mb/s.

 

[imported_bman]

I also tried streaming that video in VLC with hardware acceleration on, this caused the video to artifact every few seconds while stuttering. Firefox does not play VP9 past 720p@60 if the intel.webm flag is enabled, with it off I got the same performance as Chrome (slight stuttering at 1080p@60). I don't have the preview version of edge that has VP9 support, so I will have to wait till July to try that. Windows Media Player ran the video well at 1080p@60, started to drop frames at 1440p@60. All of the software I am using if falling back on software for VP9, does anyone know if there is software that makes use of Intel's hybrid decode for VP9 that works?

 

[therealnickdanger]

Nice! I just tested it at work with my BEAST machine* and it dropped frames like crazy. 295/598 frames dropped before I gave up. 99% CPU utilization. It was probably that 1% that kept me from enjoying it.

*circa 2008
Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz
4GB RAM
ATI Radeon 3450

My gaming rig handled it a bit better, but still dropped about 15% of frames after 1 minute. 3570K@4.2GHz+970. I wonder how much computing power is needed to downscale from 8K to 1080p... I don't have an 8K monitor to test...

 

[2is]

I also tried streaming that video in VLC with hardware acceleration on, this caused the video to artifact every few seconds while stuttering. Firefox does not play VP9 past 720p@60 if the intel.webm flag is enabled, with it off I got the same performance as Chrome (slight stuttering at 1080p@60). I don't have the preview version of edge that has VP9 support, so I will have to wait till July to try that. Windows Media Player ran the video well at 1080p@60, started to drop frames at 1440p@60. All of the software I am using if falling back on software for VP9, does anyone know if there is software that makes use of Intel's hybrid decode for VP9 that works?

The nice thing about VLC is that it plays almost anything, including many damaged/corrupt video files. The bad thing is it's one of the most inefficient media players around and it's hardware acceleration leaves a lot to be desired.

 

[SlowSpyder]

8K video... not good on my FX 8320E @ 4.1GHz. I wish I had my FX9370 in this system right now, it is good for at least another GHz. I'll see if I can squeeze this 8320E a little yet and get some more clockspeed. Dropped frames stand at 872 / 2005, and the frame rate was not good. Will update if I can get a worthwhile overclock or swap CPU's.

 

[TheRyuu]

firefox uses libvpx too
ffVP9 sounds like part of ffmpeg which is likely using libvpx

ffvp9 is ffmpeg's built-in VP9 decoder. It's better than libvpx for decoding for nearly everybody and will result in lower CPU usage since it's more efficient. There are at least two chromium bugs open for evaluating ffvp9 performance although they don't seem to have gone anywhere. Keep in mind that libvpx was developed by Google. There have apparently been rumors that this is a reason why they've stuck with libvpx for so long despite ffvp9 being superior.

You can use mpv + youtube-dl to see this difference since mpv uses ffvp9. You'll see lower CPU usage for VP9 videos. For example with the linked BF4 video I see anywhere between 50-70% CPU usage when watching it in Chrome (after it buffers fully) with it averaging somewhere around 60-65%. That same video when played using mpv only uses ~30-35%. This is on an i7-4771 with me just looking at task manager CPU usage. Also worth noting is that because of the reduction in CPU usage it can maintain a higher CPU clock (turbo) since the overall usage is less (although it's not that much higher).

Neither seemed to drop frames during playback although one thing to keep in mind is that mpv is using much higher quality downscaling than Chrome would ever have. I didn't check GPU usage but I'm pretty sure it loaded my 780GTX Ti pretty good on that BF4 4k video. That being said it would seem like Chrome would drop frames because of CPU usage while mpv would drop it because your GPU wasn't fast enough (although this is highly unlikely as significantly faster algorithms exist than the ones I'm using which are for quality).

Edit:

/var/log/packages/ffmpeg-3.0-x86_64_custom-1:usr/bin/ffplay

The binary ships with ffmpeg on my system, uses the ffmpeg libs and is maintained by the same people. It's also dynamically linked to libvpx.

Firefox uses ffvp9[1]. libvpx is required by WebRTC (likely for encoding).

The nice thing about VLC is that it plays almost anything, including many damaged/corrupt video files. The bad thing is it's one of the most inefficient media players around and it's hardware acceleration leaves a lot to be desired.

Check out mpv[2]. Coupled with youtube-dl it can play just about anything and has good hardware acceleration with its GPU rendering.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1214462
[2] https://mpv.io/

 

[2is]

8K video... not good on my FX 8320E @ 4.1GHz. I wish I had my FX9370 in this system right now, it is good for at least another GHz. I'll see if I can squeeze this 8320E a little yet and get some more clockspeed. Dropped frames stand at 872 / 2005, and the frame rate was not good. Will update if I can get a worthwhile overclock or swap CPU's.

Just don't go kill your CPU just play an 8k youtube video. You won't be able to OC high enough to get it to run perfectly given how many frames you're dropping.

 

[Zodiark1593]

I also tried streaming that video in VLC with hardware acceleration on, this caused the video to artifact every few seconds while stuttering. Firefox does not play VP9 past 720p@60 if the intel.webm flag is enabled, with it off I got the same performance as Chrome (slight stuttering at 1080p@60). I don't have the preview version of edge that has VP9 support, so I will have to wait till July to try that. Windows Media Player ran the video well at 1080p@60, started to drop frames at 1440p@60. All of the software I am using if falling back on software for VP9, does anyone know if there is software that makes use of Intel's hybrid decode for VP9 that works?

VLC does not yet support hardware decode of either HEVC or VP9.

 

[littlecx]

ivy bridge still rocks

 

[fastamdman]

My 4790k is still using like 75% on all cores on the 4k video with the gtx 1080. Is there something I need to enable for it to work with vp9? This is also a fresh windows install so I may be missing something as well.