Hacker News Reader

For most workloads, setting the number of threads to the number of vCPUs (i.e. count each hyperthreaded core as 2) works. But GPU acceleration is much better if it's available to you.

View on HN

GPU acceleration may produce worse quality and slightly larger files. So there's a trade-off to be had.

Though in my tests I found that gpu acceleration of video decoding actually hurts performance. It seems software decoding is faster than hardware for some codecs. Of course not the case for encoding.

That heavily depends on the GPU being used and whether or not it has hardware support for your codec. Maybe your GPU is just old/weak compared to your CPU?

That's possible, but if you look at nvidia, the whole range uses the same hardware accelerator, so at most it is a difference in term of chip generation, not so much GPU model.

I am not saying GPU hw decoding isn't useful, it certainly is in term of power consumption, and the CPU might be better used for something else happening at the same time. But in term of raw throughput it's not clear that a GPU beats a recent CPU.

wouldn't that only be true if your hardware doesn't have the decoder isn't built into the hardware of your gpu?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com