Intel's Ivy Bridge: An HTPC Perspective
by Ganesh T S on April 23, 2012 12:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Home Theater
- Intel
- HTPC
- Ivy Bridge
One of the main reasons for HTPC purists to override the Intel integrated GPUs was the lack of a proper 23.976 Hz refresh rate. Till Clarkdale, the Intel GPUs refreshed the display at 24 Hz when set to 23 Hz. When Sandy Bridge was launched, it was discovered that the 23 Hz setting could be activated and made to function as intended if UAC was disabled. With v2372 drivers, the disabling of UAC became unnecessary. While this didn't result in perfect 23.976 Hz (locked around 23.972 Hz), it was definitely much better than the earlier scenario.
How does Ivy Bridge fare? The short story is that the behaviour on the P8H77-M Pro board is very similar to Sandy Bridge. As the screenshot below shows, the refresh rate is quite stable around 23.973 Hz. This is as good as the bad AMD and NVIDIA GPU cards.
The good news is that Intel is claiming that this issue is fully resolved in the latest production BIOS on their motherboard. This means that BIOS updates to the current boards from other manufacturers should also get the fix. Hopefully, we should be able to independently test and confirm this soon.
It is not only the 23 Hz setting which is off the mark by a small amount. Other refresh rates also suffer similar problems (with videos played back at that frame rate dropping a frame every 5 minutes or so). The gallery below shows some of the other refresh rates that we tested.
Another aspect we found irritating with Intel's GPU control panel is the custom resolution section. Intel seems very reliant on EDID and doesn't allow the user to input any frequency not supported by the display. Our testbed display (a Sony Bravia KDL46EX720) doesn't indicate PAL compatibility in its EDID information. I was able to play back PAL videos with matched refresh rates using the Vision 3D (NVIDIA GT 425M) as well as the AMD 7750. However, Intel's control panel wouldn't allow me to set up 50 Hz as the display refresh rate. It is possible that an EDID override might help, but we can't help complaining about Intel's control panel not being as user friendly as NVIDIA's (despite the availability of a custom resolutions section in the control panel).
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Midwayman - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link
Have you ever seen a 4k display on a uncompressed signal? The clarity is just astounding.I'm more concerned about the ability to deliver content with that kind of bandwidth requirements. We already get hdtv signals that are so compressed that they're barely better than a really really good SDTV signal.
MobiusStrip - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
Most of what you see labeled "HD" (or variants thereof) is marketing bullshit. You're not getting HD when the bitrate is 3 megabits per second, especially when anything on the screen is moving.You can blow a VHS picture up to "HD" resolution, and it won't be HD. That's exactly what's happening in most consumer devices today.
"4K" is rapidly emerging as the next fraud. We'll see the same crap blown up to 3840 x whatever (barely even 4K by any standard), but containing 1K of real resolution if you're lucky.
The era of increasing quality is over, as consumers prove over and over that they don't care about quality.
A5 - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
"Otherwise, the Ivy Bridge platform has everything that a HTPC user would ever need."I'd like an open-source (or at least) free encoder that supports QuickSync and not having to be picky with my DRAM purchase to use GPU-accelerated decoders before I say that.
Other than that, it seems to be good enough for the basic HTPC functionality - can't wait for the new i3s and Pentiums to see if the low-end parts are good enough!
ganeshts - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
You can use GPU accelerated decoders even with DDR3-1333 DRAM. You need to go high speed / low latency only if you want rendering through madVR.Use QuickSync Decoder or DXVA2 Native in LAV or MPC Video Decoder + EVR-CP to get full decode and rendering acceleration without worry about the DRAM.
babgvant - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
DVRMSToolbox (DTB) has included a QS capable transcoding solution for over a year. The main benefit to using it vs. the other retail options is that it supports EDL files during transcoding.DTB is FOSS, the QS dlls are just FSS.
A5 - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
Cool stuff. Hadn't heard of your tool before today, I'll make sure to check it out when I get my HDHR Prime from Woot.shawkie - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
I've experimented with madVR a bit but in the end the problems with playing back DVDs and Blu-rays with menus has so far stopped me from using it seriously. However, I've seen reports claiming that Ivy Bridge includes higher quality upscaling within Windows Media Player (as part of the EVR I suppose). Any evidence of this?ganeshts - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
You can take a look at the PowerDVD chroma upscaling screenshots linked in the text. I was really surprised at the quality (until I zoomed to 300%, I couldn't actually decipher the difference between PowerDVD and madVR!). Similar behavior with MPC-HC using MPCVideoDec.Btw, can you link me to the reports that you mention?
shawkie - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architectur...This was one of them. I also found a comment from one of the engineers that explained that they were using a higher quality upsampling algorithm too but I can't find it now.
ganeshts - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
Andrew @ MissingRemote just refreshed my memory about this post by Eric Gur: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1551981#po...