Media Engine Hardware
As described in Architecture section, Xe- Intel® Data Center GPU Flex Series and some other
Intel GPUs contain media engine which provide fully-accelerated video decode,
encode and processing capabilities. This is sometimes called Intel
®
Quick
Sync Video. The media engine runs completely
independent of compute engines (vector and matrix engines).
Several components can be used by applications:
- MFX/Multi-format codec: hardware decode and encode. Some configurations include two forms of encode. 1) motion estimation + bit packing and 2) full fixed function/low power
- SFC/scaler and format conversion: resize (primarily intended for downscaling), conversion between color formats such as NV12 and BGRA
- Video Quality Engine: multiple frame processing operations, such as denoise and deinterlace.
This hardware has its own instruction queue and clock, so fully fixed
function work can be very low power if configured to use low power
pathways. This can also leave the slice capabilities on the GPU free for
other work.
Supported codecs
New codec capabilities are added with each new GPU hardware generation.
Note: in this table two kinds of encode are represented.
E=Hardware Encode via low power VDEncEs=Hardware Encode via (PAK) + Shader (media kernel +VME)
Intel
®
Arc A-series and Intel®
Server GPU (previously known as
Arctic Sound-M) add AV1 encode. This cutting edge successor to VP9
adds additional encode control for tile, segmentation, film grain
filtering, and other new features. These increase encode quality at
a given bitrate or allow a decrease in bitrate to provide increased
quality.