Haswell i5 better than Sandy i7 for H.264 encoding?

[jana519]

I'm doing some research here for a PC build that will serve as my primary desktop. I want a machine to do H.264 encoding with OBS. My budget is ~$200 USD for CPU/mobo so I'm looking at either a Sandy Bridge i7 or a Haswell i5. AnandTech has this benchmark: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/287?vs=1198

--Seems like the Haswell i5 has a 25% advantage on x264 HD Benchmark (121 to 97). So would the Haswell be a much better choice overall?

 

[Phynaz]

Depends, what's your definition of "better"?

Intel has continued to make quality improvements in Quicksync.

Using a software encoder an i7 will be faster than an i5.

 

[ElFenix]

iirc my haswell celeron is even with my sandy i3 for h.265, so i wouldn't be shocked if a haswell i5 is better than a sandy i7 for a similar task


although at $200 i'm guessing you're looking at second hand parts, in which case a 6 core westmere xeon might be the best

 

[jana519]

Right now I have an i3-2120 that's great for gaming but it's awful for OBS. My game recordings look grainy and pixelated. I want a CPU for very smooth game recordings at 720P output. Does that answer your question?

edit: Ah ok I see what you mean now, the i7 would be the better option for OBS software. I don't understand why the Haswell has a higher "first pass" score on the x264 benchmarks. What does that mean?

 

[RampantAndroid]

Not sure you want to use Quicksync if you care about quality, right?

 

[Zodiark1593]

I was pretty sure x264 supports AVX2, correct? Could easily make a 10% difference on top of any ipc gains, in addition, x264 is pretty good about feeding each thread, thus less left over for Hyperthreading to take advantage of, barring multi-tasking going on in the background.

 

[TheELF]

Right now I have an i3-2120 that's great for gaming but it's awful for OBS. My game recordings look grainy and pixelated. I want a CPU for very smooth game recordings at 720P output.

You will have to adjust the settings in OBS and balance the processor time correctly between game and recording,it's not that easy.

I don't understand why the Haswell has a higher "first pass" score on the x264 benchmarks. What does that mean?

Real time recording can only be done with one pass,in video converting you can do multiple passes to improve the ratio of compression/quality.

Your best option is to record your game-play to disk first with a high bitrate that's easier on the CPU and gives a better quality image, either with h264 or quicksync, and then convert/compress them for upload.
You could also try nvenc if you have a nvidia card or shadowplay which has an even lower cpu footprint.

If you are streaming live then your isp's upload limit will probably limit you to a low bitrate (pixelated image) anyway.

 

[jana519]

Real time recording can only be done with one pass,in video converting you can do multiple passes to improve the ratio of compression/quality.

Your best option is to record your game-play to disk first with a high bitrate that's easier on the CPU and gives a better quality image, either with h264 or quicksync, and then convert/compress them for upload.

That's my plan. I'm doing local recordings of Fallout: New Vegas speedruns with the plan of uploading to YouTube. I tried Shadowplay and it looked pretty good on my machine, but after uploading it to YouTube it didn't look good.

Since I'm recording locally and on the fly, seems like the "first pass" numbers would indicate the 4C Haswell being faster but people are saying that 4C/8T is better for software H.264 encoding like OBS. Are the benchmarks just plain wrong or am I missing something. What is going on here, I'm pretty confused...

 

[TheELF]

That's my plan. I'm doing local recordings of Fallout: New Vegas speedruns with the plan of uploading to YouTube. I tried Shadowplay and it looked pretty good on my machine, but after uploading it to YouTube it didn't look good.

How did you upload? With a special program? These usually will convert first so you won't know how bad a job they will do.
If you just upload the original file from youtube's own webpage the losses will be minimal,but huge uploads take forever.

Since you are doing local recordings convert them with a proper converter like handbrake before uploading them,you will have to read a few guides to understand the basics of quality and bitrate/size.

 

[Phynaz]

To add on to what TheElf wrote, your i3 has Quicksync.

I don't know about Shadowplay and what encoding options it has, but if you need to compress the video further before uploading to YouTube give Handbrake a try. Use both CPU and Quicksync encodes to see what works best for you.

 

[jana519]

How did you upload? With a special program? These usually will convert first so you won't know how bad a job they will do.
If you just upload the original file from youtube's own webpage the losses will be minimal,but huge uploads take forever.

Since you are doing local recordings convert them with a proper converter like handbrake before uploading them,you will have to read a few guides to understand the basics of quality and bitrate/size.

Directly from my Shadowplay folder to YouTube. Shadowplay records in mp4 and YouTube accepts mp4 uploads so that's how I did it. It looked pretty awful though, like a lot of video quality was lost. My idea was to use a custom OBS high quality h264 recording to fix that.

 

[SPBHM]

for CPU encoding + gaming I think having 8 threads is a good advantage

I've done some OBS local recording and sent to youtube with good results, but I used CPU encoding with medium or slow encoding, with modest bitrate.

 

[TheELF]

Directly from my Shadowplay folder to YouTube. Shadowplay records in mp4 and YouTube accepts mp4 uploads so that's how I did it. It looked pretty awful though, like a lot of video quality was lost. My idea was to use a custom OBS high quality h264 recording to fix that.

You sure you selected 1080 for playback? Youtube selects lower qualities depending on the workload of the network.

 

[jana519]

You sure you selected 1080 for playback? Youtube selects lower qualities depending on the workload of the network.

Hmmm, maybe not. I didn't select any custom settings, just dragged and dropped. I should try it again, but it was a large file and I didn't want to reupload at the time

 

[RampantAndroid]

To add on to what TheElf wrote, your i3 has Quicksync.

I don't know about Shadowplay and what encoding options it has, but if you need to compress the video further before uploading to YouTube give Handbrake a try. Use both CPU and Quicksync encodes to see what works best for you.

I'll restate what I did before: Quicksync, last I knew, has awful quality. It supports a subset of h.264's featureset, and it's fast in no small part because it sacrifices quality. Maybe that doesn't matter for a game stream. But don't go converting a bluray to h.264 and expect quicksync to be what you want.

 

[myocardia]

Right now I have an i3-2120 that's great for gaming but it's awful for OBS. My game recordings look grainy and pixelated. I want a CPU for very smooth game recordings at 720P output. Does that answer your question?

What video card are you using?

 

[SViscusi]

I know you're in the market for a cpu/mobo upgrade, but if your worried about recording gaming you always have the option of a standalone card or box like a hdpvr that can offload the realtime encoding. I use one of the old ones as a pvr and the quality is good without much in the way of a performance hit.

 

[TheELF]

I'll restate what I did before: Quicksync, last I knew, has awful quality. It supports a subset of h.264's featureset, and it's fast in no small part because it sacrifices quality. Maybe that doesn't matter for a game stream. But don't go converting a bluray to h.264 and expect quicksync to be what you want.

No quicksync has very good image quality,it's just awful if you compare it at certain low bitrates...that's a big difference, compression/quality quota is low and a lot of people will care about that but image quality as such is not awful.
If you record to your hard drive you can use a high bitrate and get a big sized file with excellent quality.