Need a little help getting smooth 4k playback on HEVC

J

joe7dust

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 25, 2013
Messages
137
Older video card and cpu, but I am able to do 4k gaming on this rig so I'd think that video would be a breeze. An interesting thing of note is that the video is smoother if I set the process to RealTime in windows but the audio stutters, so putting it on High seems to have the best overall experience. This means that perhaps a better process manager could allow a setting in between High and RealTime or some similar workaround but I am unsure about that.


CPU i3-4130
GPU 750 Ti

I was able to get a lot of info from this thread https://hardforum.com/threads/does-gtx-750-ti-support-hardware-hevc-4k-10bit-decoding.1906435/

In there it is mentioned that the 750 Ti does NOT support 4k HEVC, which explains why my CPU sits 90-100% when playing HEVC video. Any suggestions on something I can change without having to upgrade any hardware? I'm also curious if it is possible to disable HDR at the player-level, because my 4k TV does not actually support that and I think it makes the system strain more playing HDR.

Is there maybe some software that I could use to convert MKV to an uncompressed format? This would make the file size go up a lot I realize that, but it is OK.
 
No, your CPU is not powerful enough.

Buy an nvidia shield.


uncompressed 4k video.. you are looking at 20tb for a movie.
 
Verge said:
No, your CPU is not powerful enough.

Buy an nvidia shield.


uncompressed 4k video.. you are looking at 20tb for a movie.
Click to expand...
20 TB?! Wow lol I did not realize that. I thought it would be roughly 50-100GB maybe. Anyways, there must be a way to offload some of this to my GPU I mean that is kind of the job of it imo. It sits at like 5-10% GPU usage.

edit: I installed MadVR and turned all the performance tweaks on, disabled anything that looked like it would require extra processing and that made a difference. Also the colors are richer than the default renderers that come with HT-MPC, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Sometimes it looks great, but on scenes where everything is in focus at one time the CPU struggles to keep up.
 
Last edited:
You might be able to pick up a cheap i7 to replace your i3 and that may give you just about enough speed headroom.
 
James21 said:
You might be able to pick up a cheap i7 to replace your i3 and that may give you just about enough speed headroom.
Click to expand...
This a great suggestion but unfortunately I don't think I can afford it at the moment. I looked at cpu upgrades a month or two ago and the next slight upgrade would have been almost $200.
 
joe7dust said:
Older video card and cpu, but I am able to do 4k gaming on this rig so I'd think that video would be a breeze. An interesting thing of note is that the video is smoother if I set the process to RealTime in windows but the audio stutters, so putting it on High seems to have the best overall experience. This means that perhaps a better process manager could allow a setting in between High and RealTime or some similar workaround but I am unsure about that.


CPU i3-4130
GPU 750 Ti

I was able to get a lot of info from this thread https://hardforum.com/threads/does-gtx-750-ti-support-hardware-hevc-4k-10bit-decoding.1906435/

In there it is mentioned that the 750 Ti does NOT support 4k HEVC, which explains why my CPU sits 90-100% when playing HEVC video. Any suggestions on something I can change without having to upgrade any hardware? I'm also curious if it is possible to disable HDR at the player-level, because my 4k TV does not actually support that and I think it makes the system strain more playing HDR.

Is there maybe some software that I could use to convert MKV to an uncompressed format? This would make the file size go up a lot I realize that, but it is OK.
Click to expand...

Only option that doesn't involve upgrading hardware would be to encode that video to H.264 which would take a while.

I would say get a low end video card that does HEVC decoding like a GT1030 or RX550. My HTPC is using a RX460 with a Pentium G2020 and 4k HEVC playback is smooth.

A GT 1030 is going to be in the $75 dollar range and a RX 550 will probably run around $100 range.
 
qbanb8582 said:
Only option that doesn't involve upgrading hardware would be to encode that video to H.264 which would take a while.

I would say get a low end video card that does HEVC decoding like a GT1030 or RX550. My HTPC is using a RX460 with a Pentium G2020 and 4k HEVC playback is smooth.

A GT 1030 is going to be in the $75 dollar range and a RX 550 will probably run around $100 range.
Click to expand...
The real question here is how did I manage to build a decent budget 4k gaming rig that struggles on some 4k videos lol.
 
Because of the large penalty decoding H265 @4K.
Your gfx card doesnt support H265 and your CPU is too slow to do it.
H265 compression is far more intense than H264 (1080p Blu Ray etc) to fit twice as long video in the same file size.

Encoding the video to H264 will double the file size and probably reduce quality a little (due to encoding loss).
Thats really your only chance of using your current hardware, but the encoding might take days for one film plus all the aggro.
Bite the bullet and get a compatible video card, you could get improved gaming if you choose well.
You might get lucky in the fs/ft forum, make a post.
 
joe7dust said:
The real question here is how did I manage to build a decent budget 4k gaming rig that struggles on some 4k videos lol.
Click to expand...

Eeeh, not sure what you are playing lol.

Basically you are stuck at 1080p for now, and i really don't think you understand the whole UHD thing anyway. 95% of the movies released are 2k upscales to 4k. The only advantage is WCG and HDR... which even if your card had HEVC acceleration, it can't display. So you gain absolutely nothing.
 
Verge said:
Eeeh, not sure what you are playing lol.

Basically you are stuck at 1080p for now, and i really don't think you understand the whole UHD thing anyway. 95% of the movies released are 2k upscales to 4k. The only advantage is WCG and HDR... which even if your card had HEVC acceleration, it can't display. So you gain absolutely nothing.
Click to expand...

This card does HDR but only at 30hz and only on a specific color space (4:2:0 IIRC). I actually returned the first 4k TV I had for a $100 cheaper model without HDR so not going to be using it anyways.

Pretty much every game I have runs decently in 4k. I go over my 2gb VRAM pretty easily though so I mainly use shared system ram. It works better than expected. For instance Forza Horizons 3 gives an ingame nag about low video memory but it still plays just fine and shows 10.5gb of 2gb in use lol.

I only have issue with 265 encoding which. Unfortunately YouTube also seems to use. It isn't really a big deal though I will simply convert them to 264 or use my fire TV to play the 265 content over network via Kodi app.
 
You can get 60 Hz 8-bit 4:4:4 out of your GTX 750 Ti. Just use an active DisplayPort to HDMI 2.0b converter ($20 on Amazon). That will also allow you to get 10-bit 60Hz, at reduced color fidelity. I'm using this to game on my 4k tv.

I'm able to play older games like Portal 2 at 4k resolution on mine, and driving games like Forza aren't all that much more demanding. I can decode h.265 without issue on my Core i3 because I don't store above 1080p: at 10 feet away, I can only just tell the difference between 720p and 1080p.

You can always re-encode your downloaded 4k videos at 1080p, and then see if you can tell the difference. That would save you a ton of storage space, and make playback easier for your CPU.

I only bought a 4k TV so I could have the extra clarity on the desktop. For video playback, there's no noticeable difference in quality above Blu-Ray quality 1080p. You can keep the HDR in those 1080p re-encodes, so there's no fidelity loss doing this.
 
Last edited:
defaultluser said:
You can get 60 Hz 8-bit 4:4:4 out of your GTX 750 Ti. Just use an active DisplayPort to HDMI 2.0b converter ($20 on Amazon). That will also allow you to get 10-bit 60Hz, at reduced color fidelity. I'm using this to game on my 4k tv.

I'm able to play older games like Portal 2 at 4k resolution on mine, and driving games like Forza aren't all that much more demanding. I can decode h.265 without issue on my Core i3 because I don't store above 1080p: at 10 feet away, I can only just tell the difference between 720p and 1080p.

You can always re-encode your downloaded 4k videos at 1080p, and then see if you can tell the difference. That would save you a ton of storage space, and make playback easier for your CPU.

I only bought a 4k TV so I could have the extra clarity on the desktop. For video playback, there's no noticeable difference in quality above Blu-Ray quality 1080p. You can keep the HDR in those 1080p re-encodes, so there's no fidelity loss doing this.
Click to expand...
Thank you for all the info. HDR isn't a possibility for me unless I get a new TV. It was less than $190 shipped!

I am not too informed on all the fidelity stuff so I will try your suggestion. I usually use RGB it seems to have a nicer white balance and less lag. It is mainly a habit from my old monitor though which has much better looking black levels with "Full" range enabled (gets automatically disabled on Ycbr mode).

When I had the other TV with HDR ( $350+), I couldn't get a signal for anything 10bit and 60hz, only 4:2:0 30hz worked. I guess an active display port adapter would have enabled it, had no idea about that. I had thought that display port was equal to hdmi on 3 or less monitor setups.
 
defaultluser said:
DisplayPort got updated to 4k 60 Hz several years before HDMI did. That's why the early Maxwell cards have HDMI 1.4, while later cards have 2.0.

The GTX 680 was Nvidia's first 4k-capaple video card.

You can use this adapter on any Kepler or later DisplayPort to allow HDMI with 4k @ 60 Hz 8-bit RGB.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00S0C7QO8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Click to expand...

It's working fine over hdmi at the moment. Also the other TV did 4k 60hz no problem just not hdr >30hz.

I wonder if I can get a budget 1x pcie card just for VP8 and use it for processing only kind of like having a card just for PhysX? Not ready to spend much money on a gpu/psu right now.
 
Nenu said:
Encoding the video to H264 will double the file size and probably reduce quality a little (due to encoding loss).
Click to expand...

The file size went down almost 50% :p

To be fair this is probably due my converter program having max birate of 40Mbps... Some loss for sure but I expect it to be far better than 1080p quality. Not sure why it would take days one estimate said 4 hrs and other 11, shall see.
 
joe7dust said:
The file size went down almost 50% :p

To be fair this is probably due my converter program having max birate of 40Mbps... Some loss for sure but I expect it to be far better than 1080p quality. Not sure why it would take days one estimate said 4 hrs and other 11, shall see.
Click to expand...

File size is proportional to the quality settings.
Up to you if you dont mind lower quality.
 
For action movies, I typically go for lower resolution, with high relative bandwidth, rather than the same resolution with lower bandwidth.

I find that the blurring from AVC/HEVC to be pretty ugly. Most TV scalers do a better job with up-scaling high-quality low resolution content than h.264/265 do with bandwidth-starved encoding at native resolution.
 
defaultluser said:
For action movies, I typically go for lower resolution, with high relative bandwidth, rather than the same resolution with lower bandwidth.

I find that the blurring from AVC/HEVC to be pretty ugly. Most TV scalers do a better job with up-scaling high-quality low resolution content than h.264/265 do with bandwidth-starved encoding at native resolution.
Click to expand...


Hevc seems to do better in bandwidth starved instances. Otherwise, use 264. Unless it’s uhd with hdr, but don’t reencide that, just buy more drives.
 
We're not talking about saving space, we;re talking about saving decode processing power.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top