Question Question about AV1 codec

[Luddite]

Is it better to have hardware enabled AV1 encoder/decoder in the CPU or the GPU? I've been reading conflicting accounts lately.

 

[TheELF]

If a CPU has AV1 hardware support it's through the iGPU, so same thing.
Otherwise if it's purely compute, CPU only, then it's software based not hardware.

 

[Luddite]

If both the CPU (via iGPU) and dGPU have Av1 hardware support, which one is better to work from? (I guess with Intel, they work together via Quick Sync, is this right?).

Is it better to have hardware or software based AV1?

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Is it better to have hardware or software based AV1?

That depends on your goal. Hardware encoding is much faster, but pure CPU encoding is much better quality. That goes for all codecs.

Be warned. Software AV1 encoding via handbrake is fairly slow, even on fast CPUs.

 

[TheELF]

That depends on your goal. Hardware encoding is much faster, but pure CPU encoding is much better quality. That goes for all codecs.

Be warned. Software AV1 encoding via handbrake is fairly slow, even on fast CPUs.

That is only true at extremely low bitrates that no sane person that cares about quality would even consider using.

If both the CPU (via iGPU) and dGPU have Av1 hardware support, which one is better to work from? (I guess with Intel, they work together via Quick Sync, is this right?).

You would have to read reviews on them to see which one has the better quality/size ratio or you can just go by which one is faster which you can easily test yourself.

Quicksync will only use the iGPU.
Unless you have an intel GPU in which case I have no idea what would happen.

 

[Geegeeoh]

That is only true at extremely low bitrates that no sane person that cares about quality would even consider using.

And I must be insane than...
What are those "low bitrates"? ~5Mbps? or duble that? or half?