SPARKLE Intel Arc A310 ELF Graphics Card Goes Good!

I had a 2080ti that I used to game on, but I hadn't been using it for a while, so I gave it to my nephew. Then I took a gamble on a SPARKLE Intel Arc A310 ELF. For just doing desktop stuff, it sounded good. It's got lots of connectors, powers itself from the PCI-E slot, and has all the latest hardware video accelerators including AV1 - plus a decent price. Just now I put the hardware encoder through some tests, and it went well!

So I've got a bunch of home movie files that I ripped way back, and they are encoded losslessly with FFV1, which means the file sizes are huge. That's okay for my offline-storage, but I wanted to reduce the file-size for my daily-drive (just a 2tb portable). So I picked a test file that was ~59 seconds long, and ~144MB (144579kb). Like I said, it's "25i" PAL video capture. ffprobe reports it as ffv1 (FFV1 / 0x31564646), yuv420p(tv, bt470bg/unknown/unknown, top coded first (swapped)), 720x576, 25 fps...

So as you can see in the logs below, I tested the hardware h264 encoder first, and tried a bunch of options that were reported via ffmpeg -h encoder=h264_qsv, but it seems many of them did nothing (maybe because I was rendering non-HD video at near-lossless quality - so there maybe wasn't much to "optimise"). Then I tried the hevc(h265) HW encoder, and then the av1 HW encoder. Then I was asking chat-gpt about making the files "snappier", hence I did some stuff with keyframes. It also told me I should be deinterlacing, which I tested at the end.

At the same time I was testing the first 8 seconds of each video with this "video quality prediction model" I found: https://github.com/Telecommunication-Telemedia-Assessment/bi…

… gives the quality of the video sequence on a mean opinion score (MOS) scale between 1 and 5, where 1 corresponds to bad and 5 corresponds to excellent.

TLDR for deinterlaced 50fps video: {-vf yadif=1}

• "Reference quality" with software encoder, {-c:v libx264 -crf 1} transcoded at 240fps, filesize 220MB, quality = 3.40.
  (FYI, I have a 5950x, but I used ffmpeg defaults, so I don't know if it used the CPU "fully")
• With "lossless" HW H264, {-c:v h264_qsv -global_quality 1} transcoded at 740fps, filesize 59MB, quality = 3.17.
• With "near-lossless" HW H264, {-c:v h264_qsv -global_quality 16} transcoded at 725fps, filesize 33MB, quality = 3.15.
• With "lossless" HW AV1, {-c:v av1_qsv -global_quality 1} transcoded at 690fps, filesize 32MB, quality = 3.34.

So I went with the AV1 encoder because it is very fast, has much improved compression, and only a small "quality" loss. When I ran it all the files, the GPU chugged along at 70% usage, pulled ~20watts, and sat at about 55C. And at the end of it all, it had turned 192GB of lossless 25i in to 46GB of near-lossless 50p video. A great result in my opinion!

# libx264 = software h264 encoder. libx265 = SW h265 aka HEVC.
# ??_qsv = ["Intel Quick Sync Video"](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Hardware/QuickSync) HW encoders

libx264--crf_0,preset_slow,tune_grain                 fps=175  Lsize= 155,675KiB
libx264--crf_0,preset_slow                            fps=191  Lsize= 155,675KiB  ~  qual = 2.879366373285043
libx264--crf_0,preset_veryslow                        fps= 76  Lsize= 155,633KiB  ~  qual = 2.879174524776416
libx264--qp_0,preset_slow                             fps=190  Lsize= 155,675KiB
libx264rgb--crf_0,preset_slow                         fps= 93  Lsize= 424,024KiB

libx265--preset_slow,lossless_1,keyint_1              fps= 49  Lsize= 195,179KiB
libx265--preset_slow,lossless_1                       fps= 40  Lsize= 208,084KiB
libx265--preset_medium,lossless_1,keyint_1            fps= 55  Lsize= 195,216KiB
libx265--preset_faster,lossless_1,keyint_1            fps= 59  Lsize= 195,275KiB

x264_qsv--defaults                                    fps=610  Lsize=   8,736KiB  ~  qual = 2.1937952301291945
x264_qsv--q_25                                        fps=639  Lsize=   9,350KiB  ~  qual = 2.260815135784002
x264_qsv--q_31                                        fps=583  Lsize=   7,141KiB  ~  qual = 1.5984725593807805
x264_qsv--q_2                                         fps=535  Lsize=  71,865KiB  ~  qual = 2.9371376463359278
x264_qsv--global_qual_2                               fps=579  Lsize=  46,476KiB  ~  qual = 2.8877787816043936
x264_qsv--global_qual_25                              fps=622  Lsize=  10,976KiB  ~  qual = 2.494614096232868
x264_qsv--global_qual_25,look_ahead_1                 fps=625  Lsize=  10,976KiB  ~  qual = 2.494614096232868
x264_qsv--global_qual_2,look_ahead_1                  fps=543  Lsize=  46,476KiB  ~  qual = 2.8877787816043936
x264_qsv--global_qual_2,look_ahead_1,preset_slow      fps=486  Lsize=  46,459KiB  ~  qual = 2.887756633831109
x264_qsv--global_qual_4,look_ahead_1,preset_slow      fps=540  Lsize=  46,459KiB  ~  qual = 2.887756633831109
x264_qsv--global_qual_8,look_ahead_1,preset_slow      fps=561  Lsize=  46,459KiB  ~  qual = 2.887756633831109
x264_qsv--global_qual_8,look_ahead_1_5,preset_slow    fps=565  Lsize=  46,459KiB  ~  qual = 2.887756633831109
x264_qsv--global_qual_8,look_ahead_1_5,preset_0       fps=561  Lsize=  46,476KiB  ~  qual = 2.8877787816043936
x264_qsv--global_qual_8,look_ahead_1_5,preset_3       fps=507  Lsize=  46,459KiB  ~  qual = 2.887756633831109
x264_qsv--global_qual_8,look_ahead_1_5,pre_3,scene_3  fps=532  Lsize=  46,459KiB  ~  qual = 2.887756633831109
x264_qsv--global_qual_8,look_ahead_1_5,pre_3,scene_4  fps=522  Lsize=  46,459KiB  ~  qual = 2.887756633831109
x264_qsv--global_qual_8,look_ahead_1_5,pre_3,scene_5  fps=483  Lsize=  46,459KiB  ~  qual = 2.887756633831109
x264_qsv--global_qual_8,look_ahead_1_5,scene_5        fps=517  Lsize=  46,476KiB  ~  qual = 2.8877787816043936
x264_qsv--global_qual_8,look_ahead_1_25,scene_5       fps=567  Lsize=  46,476KiB  ~  qual = 2.8877787816043936
x264_qsv--global_qual_8,look_ahead_1_100,scene_5      fps=553  Lsize=  46,476KiB  ~  qual = 2.8877787816043936
x264_qsv--global_qual_8,scene_5                       fps=510  Lsize=  46,476KiB  ~  qual = 2.8877787816043936
x264_qsv--global_qual_8,scene_4                       fps=575  Lsize=  46,476KiB  ~  qual = 2.8877787816043936
x264_qsv--global_qual_8,scene_3                       fps=482  Lsize=  46,476KiB  ~  qual = 2.8877787816043936
x264_qsv--global_qual_8                               fps=518  Lsize=  46,476KiB  ~  qual = 2.8877787816043936
x264_qsv--global_qual_12                              fps=494  Lsize=  41,808KiB  ~  qual = 2.880873323015015
x264_qsv--global_qual_13                              fps=560  Lsize=  37,351KiB  ~  qual = 2.8492832295158426
x264_qsv--global_qual_14                              fps=600  Lsize=  32,431KiB  ~  qual = 2.8303869962206862
x264_qsv--global_qual_15                              fps=611  Lsize=  28,208KiB  ~  qual = 2.779349466997285
x264_qsv--global_qual_16                              fps=583  Lsize=  24,624KiB  ~  qual = 2.729988182620431

hevc_qsv--global_qual_2                               fps=480  Lsize=  42,534KiB  ~  qual = 2.9129809435198224
hevc_qsv--global_qual_8                               fps=477  Lsize=  42,534KiB  ~  qual = 2.9129809435198224
hevc_qsv--global_qual_12                              fps=505  Lsize=  39,197KiB  ~  qual = 2.6911284571138467
hevc_qsv--global_qual_16                              fps=595  Lsize=  24,434KiB  ~  qual = 2.649475565903116

av1_qsv--defaults                                     fps=595  Lsize=   6,506KiB  ~  qual = 2.9379551312983736
av1_qsv--q_1                                          fps=574  Lsize=  42,180KiB  ~  qual = 2.974338209046417
av1_qsv--global_qual_1                                fps=584  Lsize=  22,306KiB  ~  qual = 2.9663573051808747
av1_qsv--global_qual_2                                fps=569  Lsize=  22,306KiB  ~  qual = 2.9663573051808747
av1_qsv--global_qual_4                                fps=580  Lsize=  22,306KiB  ~  qual = 2.9663573051808747
av1_qsv--global_qual_8                                fps=589  Lsize=  21,773KiB  ~  qual = 2.9441795810304714
av1_qsv--global_qual_12                               fps=577  Lsize=  21,611KiB  ~  qual = 2.9441795810304714
av1_qsv--global_qual_16                               fps=592  Lsize=  20,953KiB  ~  qual = 2.9520681402030133

av1_qsv--global_qual_1,frames_50                      fps=603  Lsize=  24,240KiB  # awesome scroll.
av1_qsv--global_qual_1,frames_100                     fps=559  Lsize=  22,947KiB  # good enough scroll using `-g 100 -keyint_min 1 -forced-idr 1 -look_ahead 0`

# deinterlacing tests start here...

av1_qsv--global_qual_1,frames_100,yadif               fps=555  Lsize=  21,971KiB  ~  qual = 2.9600490440685556   # default (same as mode=0) & gives 25fps (one frame per frame)
av1_qsv--global_qual_1,frames_100,yadif_1             fps=689  Lsize=  31,596KiB  ~  qual = 3.341668290434656    # gives 50fps (one frame per field)
av1_qsv--global_qual_1,frames_100,yadif_3             fps=639  Lsize=  31,756KiB  ~  qual = 3.3301580567942333   # gives 50fps (one frame per field)
av1_qsv--global_qual_1,frames_100,bwdif               fps=786  Lsize=  33,145KiB  ~  qual = 3.3301580567942333   # default (same as send_field=1) & gives 50fps (one frame per field)
av1_qsv--global_qual_1,frames_100,mcdeint,yadif=1     fps=108  Lsize=  24,547KiB  ~  qual = 3.326737218238156    # motion blurs after yadif. May look nicer, but isn't good for "archive".
av1_qsv--global_qual_1,frames_100,mcdeint,yadif=3     fps=110  Lsize=  24,683KiB  ~  qual = 3.3301580567942333
libx264--crf_1,frames_100,yadif_1                     fps=242  Lsize= 222,162KiB  ~  qual = 3.4018759851504567
libx264--crf_0,preset_slow,frames_100,yadif_1         fps=199  Lsize= 270,708KiB  ~  qual = 3.225124763304323    # dunno why the quality went down.
h264_qsv--global_qual_1,frames_100,yadif_1            fps=743  Lsize=  59,122KiB  ~  qual = 3.171612916196122
h264_qsv--global_qual_16,frames_100,yadif_1           fps=725  Lsize=  33,051KiB  ~  qual = 3.1517412696728675