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Comment by bjoli | Hacker News Reader

Intel is by far the best out of the box experience under linux. I have 3 cards. I will get one of the new battlmage cards for my gaming pc.

Edit: the only downside is that the hw h265 encoder is pretty bad. Av1 is fine though

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I don’t have any experience with discrete Intel cards, but yes their iGPUs have been flawless for me under Linux. Same for other components, to the point that I’d say a reasonable way of gauging how well a laptop will work with Linux is to look at how much of its hardware is Intel (CPU excluded). Intel wifi/bluetooth and ethernet are also great under Linux for example.

What does a "pretty bad" h265 implementation look like? Buggy? Inefficient or what?

Video encoders can vary widely in quality. There are lots of parameters that allow for a wide range of "correct" encodings of the same source video file. Realtime hardware encoders in general have lower visual quality for the same bitrate than software encoders that may be slower but more thoroughly search through different options for encoding each group of frames.

Decoding is much more deterministic, so speed and power efficiency are the main ways hardware decoders can differ.

The h265 quality is just not up to par. The av1 encoder does a nice enough job, so does the h264 one.

Encoded media either comes out blocky, with artifacts, or plain old slow. Some also have bugs related to the encoder that app developers have to contend with.

I was reading that Intel GPU firmware cannot be upgraded under Linux, only Windows, is that still the case?

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