 On the other side of this wall is an amazing, amazing video coding format. It's faster, it's got better quality, and it's gonna be everywhere in a few short years. I want to be an early adopter of AV1, but my GPU doesn't support it. And Nvidia's RTX 40 series is so expensive that it feels completely out of reach. And besides, I don't even need the extra gaming performance. Hey kid, we got all these aren't GPUs nobody wants. They're cheap as heck, and they got the good stuff from behind the wall. Maybe there is a better way. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that you actually buy an A380 for gaming, but we spent the last week exploring productivity and streaming workloads that could easily justify adding one of these to your current GPU. It's really, really cool. Almost as cool as this segue to our sponsor. iFixit, is your battery beginning to bulge? Looking for a new project? iFixit has you covered. Stay tuned to the end of the video to learn more about their battery replacement kits. It sounds like madness. Buy a GPU only to never play games on it? But let me explain. The problem, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Nvidia. Their new RTX 4000 series cards are staggeringly fast and come loaded with all the latest bells and whistles. DLSS3, hardware assisted AV1 encoding and decoding, except they start at 900 US dollars, meaning that until AMD's RX 7000 cards maybe ride in and save the day, almost no one can afford to go next gen, bringing us to our unconventional proposal. Adding an ARC GPU to your existing setup isn't gonna close the gap in terms of gaming performance, but what it can do is modernize the features that your PC supports, enabling you to get the most out of next generation DisplayPort 2.0 monitors, and more importantly, properly handle AV1 media. I know, I know. Hardware support for media codecs isn't the sexiest topic, but imagine a world without it. If your phone had to use its general purpose CPU cores for video decoding, you might get an hour, maybe two hours, of screen time watching YouTube videos. Not that you'd want to hold it in your hand for that long. And without hardware accelerated encoding, your M1 MacBook Air could easily take 30 minutes to export a video rather than three. The difference in both power efficiency and performance really is that stark, which raises the question, why don't we use hardware acceleration for everything? Ah, I'm glad you asked. All other things being equal, the cost of a microprocessor is proportional to its physical size. And while fixed function hardware like a media decoder or encoder is really great at that one thing, it is basically useless for anything else. And it adds cost to every single chip. So unless you are darn sure that every customer is gonna use it, you'd probably be better off leaving out that fixed function hardware and beefing up your more versatile general purpose processing cores. All of which means that given that Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are all on board, AV1 must be a pretty big deal. It is. If you use the internet, you will eventually benefit from AV1, even if you don't realize it. That's because the biggest users of AV1 are gonna be mega corporations like Amazon, Disney, and Google. How do I know? Because it's gonna save them a lot of money. To start with, AV1 is entirely open source and royalty free, making it super cheap to implement at scale. The ubiquitous H.264 codec has been outdated for a long time, but the reason we're still stuck with it is because more modern alternatives like H.265 cost operators between 20 and 120 cents per device, which for our company with as many users as Twitch, adds up pretty fast. Of course, if Twitch's recent actions are anything to go by, they probably aren't gonna be passing the savings along to their creators, but this is still a win for you, the viewer, and actually creators. Brace yourself, because things are about to get a little technical. The general consumer might think of video image quality in terms of resolution. You know, 4K is better than 1080p, which is better than 720p, which is better than potato. But in reality, there's another critical factor at play, bitrate. At a given resolution, a lower bitrate results in a fuzzier image with blocking, bending, and other motion artifacts. Meanwhile, a higher bitrate clears everything up, at least until you reach a point of diminishing returns, at which point you probably need to crank the resolution. Let's look at an example. 4K subscribers on floatplane.com are gonna be able to see the difference best thanks to our high quality content delivery pipeline, but hopefully everyone else will be able to follow along. This H.264 game footage was captured using Open Broadcaster software. Looks pretty bad, doesn't it? But that's not their fault. It was encoded at only 3,500 kilobits per second and used the default very fast CPU encoding preset. That means it takes very little bandwidth to stream, and it leaves enough CPU resources available to run your game. That's why some Twitch streamers use this option. The easiest way to fix this quality is to juice up the bitrate. Here's that same clip at 8,000 kilobits per second. That's a lot better. So why doesn't everybody just do this? It's because even if you have a great internet connection, the bandwidth required on Twitch's side would cost too much. So only partners are allowed to stream at this level of quality. Or are they? The very fast X264 encoding preset cuts a lot of corners to save on CPU cycles. But if you happen to have a roided out Threadripper rig or a separate streaming PC, you can absolutely choose a heavier preset. Here's what medium looks like instead of very fast at that same 3,500 kilobit per second. That's a huge improvement, though it does come at the cost of some CPU usage, because that's the thing. It turns out it takes a lot more computing power to preserve this much image quality at the same bitrate. Bringing us back then to why we like hardware encoders so much. The NVENC encoder that Nvidia includes on their modern GPUs manages to look nearly as good as the medium preset. And under normal circumstances, it only has a negligible impact on your gaming experience. So we're all good then, right? Well, no, we're not. This still looks like hot garbage compared to the original uncompressed video. RTX 4000 might improve matters here, but as I mentioned before, it starts at $900. And besides, you're a gamer. You already have a GPU, don't you? That is where Intel's Arc A380 comes in. It features both AV1 decoding and encoding, meaning that it will accelerate both playback and creation of AV1 media with very low CPU usage. And all you need to get one is 140 bucks. We're gonna have it linked down below, and a PCIe slot that you're probably not using anyway. I mean, it feels kind of wild to be going back to the co-processor days, doesn't it? But there we are. Let's take a look at the results. At 8,000 kilobit per second, the improvement, if any, is actually pretty hard to spot. So you Twitch partners out there probably won't be lining up to purchase an Arc A380. But what about the rest of us? If I'm on a lower speed connection and I wanna stream at 3,500 kilobit per second, that is a night and day difference next to our original X264 fast preset. And it's even a market improvement compared to Medium and NVENC. The real mindblower in our results though is that after a pixel peeping session from our production manager, Edsel, he found that AV1 at 3,500 kilobit per second looked almost as good as our other encoders at 6,000 kilobit per second. It's worth noting that H.265 looked as good or maybe even better than AV1. But you can only stream using codecs that a platform supports. And given the cost, that's never gonna happen. We also weren't the only ones to be so impressed. We encountered some anomalous results using Netflix's image comparison tool, VMAF, but streaming guru, EposVox, managed to get it to play nicely and found that Intel's AV1 encoder not only outperformed every other encoder on the market at 3,500 kilobit per second by a wide margin, but also managed to get surprisingly close to a score of 90 at 8,000 kilobit per second, which should be nearly indistinguishable from the source. Thanks for sharing your graphs, Addy, by the way. I probably owe you a creator edition of the LTT screwdriver. For the rest of you, you can get it at lttstore.com. Speaking of creators, your Arc card has practical uses beyond gaming as well. Remember when I mentioned the Apple M1 chip? Well, its excellent timeline performance in Final Cut is at least partly thanks to its hardware decoding for popular codecs, including ProRes. And with an Arc GPU, we can expect the same kinds of boosts on AV1 video editing timelines, eventually we hope. Officially today, DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere both support AV1, but DaVinci had some weird preview window behavior and Adobe's implementation, well, didn't seem to work for us at all. Handbrake supports it though, for my encoding nerd friends out there. And the obvious benefit for you all, aside from everything we've talked about so far, is that file sizes for your locally stored media libraries can be much smaller. Pretty cool, but it's worth mentioning that a lot of what we're saying is forward looking. And there are drawbacks to this co-processor approach, drawbacks that led to the computer industry abandoning it many, many years ago. An extra card in your system means an increase in power consumption, heat, and probably noise. And while Intel has squashed most of the bugs that we documented when Arc debuted, we did still run into some issues. This card only worked in a specific slot on our motherboard. And if we dared to plug a monitor into our integrated GPU while the Arc card was installed, the system would blue screen almost immediately. The AV1 codec itself is also far from beginner friendly. Take a look at how verbose these configuration settings are, and that'll give you some idea. Now, a bit of this learning curve can be attributed to the fact that it's still early days for the AV1 codec and the communities that will use it haven't gotten around to experimenting with all these buttons and dials and sharing their findings online. We also don't know how well Intel's implementation of AV1 will hold up compared to the competition. We're gonna have to look at them side by side, but at the time of writing, all of our 4000 series cards are tied up in the lab, and AMD's RX 7000s haven't even arrived yet. But take a step back and look at the big picture. Regardless of how well these new GPUs handle AV1, 140 bucks for an A380 is gonna be a cheaper option. And if the upcoming A310 ends up hitting retail instead of being OEM only, it could end up being 30 to $40 cheaper than this with the same encode and decode capabilities. As a bonus, all our cards support DisplayPort 2.0 UHBR 10, though I don't know that I would actually hook that next gen high refresh rate monitor up to this particular card. It's just a nice to have if you wanna use one for content creation. Bottom line, this is a novel solution for tomorrow's problem today, but I'm not out here selling your ARC GPUs. You don't need to freak out if you don't have hardware AV1 support just yet, because you can always lean on your CPU for that, especially on the desktop. Fun fact, by the way, YouTube has already rolled it out if you wanna try it, and platforms like Twitch are sure to follow suit once they finish work on their implementations. Just like I'm finished implementing this message from our sponsor. iFixit. iFixit is here to help you keep your devices powered like they're brand new. They provide an expansive range of battery replacement kits for your devices. They have kits for laptops, cell phones, tablets, smartwatches, and even Nintendo switches. Is it your first time repairing a device? Don't worry. Each kit has a simple to follow step-by-step guide with photos to walk you through the process. It's like a children's book. Save yourself time and money while getting to explore a new hobby. Check out ifixit.com slash LTT to find fixed kits for your devices today. If you enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy our look at the RTX 4000 launch where we were maybe a little too quick to write off arc. Turns out it does have at least one purpose.