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MSU Video Codecs Comparison 2022
Part 1: Hardware encoders

Seventeen Annual Video-Codecs Comparison by MSU

Video group head: Dr. Dmitriy Vatolin
Project head: Dr. Dmitriy Kulikov
Measurements, analysis: Nikita Alutis,
Mikhail Voronin,
Nickolay Safonov,
Ekaterina Shumitskaya
compression.ru Lomonosov
Moscow State University (MSU)
Graphics and Media Lab
Dubna International
State University
Institute for Information
Transmission Problems,
Russian Academy of Science

News

  • 15.04.2023 Several typos corrected, leaderboard updated (note: several places changed)
  • 14.04.2023 Report release

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Description


In MSU Hardware Video Codecs Comparison 2022, we analyzed 14 hardware codecs. There were 3 different speed usecases: 60 fps, 120 fps, 240 fps. 53 FullHD video sequences were used for testing.


Note:

The set of videos used in this comparison consists of less videos than FullHD part because of compatibility issues


Results


  • The places below are given by quality scores
  • Encoders with scores closer than ~1% share one place
Very-fast (60 fps)
Best encoder
YUV-SSIM, YUV-PSNR
1st: Streamlake-200 (ASIC), Tencent Canghai 265 (ASIC)
2nd: BVE (FPGA)
3nd: BLUEDOT_AV1 (FPGA)
Best encoder
Y-VMAF (v0.6.3)
1st: Tencent Canghai 265 (ASIC)
2nd: BVE (FPGA)
3nd: Streamlake-200 (ASIC)
Best encoder
YUV-VMAF (v0.6.3)
1st: BVE (FPGA), Tencent Canghai 265 (ASIC)
1st: Streamlake-200 (ASIC)
1st: BLUEDOT_AV1 (FPGA)
Best GPU encoder
1st: Intel QSV AV1 (GPU)
Best FPGA encoder
1st: BVE (FPGA)
Best ASIC encoder
1st: Tencent Canghai 265 (ASIC), Streamlake-200 (ASIC)

Super-fast (120 fps)
Best encoder
YUV-SSIM, Y-VMAF (v0.6.3), YUV-PSNR, YUV-VMAF (v0.6.3)
1st: Tencent Canghai 265 (ASIC)
1st: Streamlake-200 (ASIC)
1st: Intel QSV AV1 (GPU)
Best GPU encoder
1st: Intel QSV AV1 (GPU)
Best ASIC encoder
1st: Tencent Canghai 265 (ASIC)

Ultra-fast (240 fps)
Best encoder
YUV-SSIM, Y-VMAF (v0.6.3), YUV-PSNR, YUV-VMAF (v0.6.3)
1st: Streamlake-200 (ASIC)
1st: Intel QSV AV1 (GPU)
1st: NVENC H.265 (GPU)
Best GPU encoder
1st: Intel QSV AV1 (GPU)
Best ASIC encoder
1st: Streamlake-200 (ASIC)

The winners vary for different objective quality metrics. The participants were rated using BSQ-rate (enhanced BD-rate) scores [1].

[1] A. Zvezdakova, D. Kulikov, S. Zvezdakov, D. Vatolin, "BSQ-rate: a new approach for video-codec performance comparison and drawbacks of current solutions," 2020.

Speed/quality trade-off "Very-fast 60 fps" all sequences, YUV (6:1:1)-SSIM metric

Speed/quality trade-off "Very-fast 60 fps (neglecting lookahead i/o time" on three longest sequences, YUV (6:1:1)-SSIM metric


Please note that this year average video length was selected to be bigger to neglect lookahead effect. That is why two charts are very similar

Download


FPGA Express Report
Objective comparison of ultra-fast and hardware-accelerated video encoders
Released on April, 14



Full version for free
14 hardware-accelerated encoders
Streamlake-200 (ASIC), Tencent Canghai 265 (ASIC), BVE1.1 (FPGA), BLUEDOT_AV1 (FPGA), Reference x265 (CPU), NVENC H.265 (GPU), NVENC H.264 (GPU), Intel QSV AV1 (Intel Arc GPU), Intel QSV H265 (Intel Arc GPU), Intel QSV H264 (Intel Arc GPU), Intel QSV H265 (CPU), Intel QSV H264 (CPU), AMD H.265 (GPU), AMD H.264 (GPU),
53 FullHD videos
60, 120 and 240 fps usecases
28+ objective metrics (VMAF, SSIM, MS-SSIM, PSNR of different variants)
HTML report + links to source videos (ZIP)
5400+ interactive charts

Participants


Codec name Platform Standard Usecases Version
1 Reference x265
MulticoreWare, Inc.
CPU H.265/HEVC Very-fast, Super-fast, Ultra-fast (60 fps, 120 fps, 240 fps) 3.5+1-f0c1022b6, Windows
2 Tencent Canghai 265
Tencent
ASIC H.265/HEVC Very-fast, Super-fast (60 fps, 120 fps) -
3
Streamlake-200
StreamLake-200: Data Center High performance AI-VPU for Cloud, designed for high quality, density, flexibility for cloud and edge. Infrastructure for live streaming, cloud game, broadcasting, embedded Kuaishou leading video technology.

Streamlake
ASIC H.265/HEVC Very-fast, Super-fast, Ultra-fast (60 fps, 120 fps, 240 fps) -
4 BVE
Bytedance
FPGA - Very-fast (60 fps) 1.1
5
BLUEDOT_AV1
Pulsar-AV1 FPGA encoder v1.0, 1080p60fps, Available at Azure NP10

Bluedot
FPGA AV1 Very-fast (60 fps) 1.0
6 NVENC H.265 (NVIDIA Titan RTX GPU)
GPU H.265/HEVC Very-fast, Super-fast, Ultra-fast (60 fps, 120 fps, 240 fps) -
7 NVENC H.264 (NVIDIA Titan RTX GPU)
GPU H.265/HEVC Very-fast, Super-fast, Ultra-fast (60 fps, 120 fps, 240 fps) -
8 Intel QSV AV1 (Intel Arc GPU)
Intel Corp.
GPU AV1 Very-fast, Super-fast, Ultra-fast (60 fps, 120 fps, 240 fps) -
9 Intel QSV H.265 (Intel Arc GPU)
Intel Corp.
GPU H.265/HEVC Very-fast, Super-fast, Ultra-fast (60 fps, 120 fps, 240 fps) -
10 Intel QSV H.264 (Intel Arc GPU)
Intel Corp.
GPU H.264/AVC Very-fast, Super-fast, Ultra-fast (60 fps, 120 fps, 240 fps) -
11 Intel QSV H.265 (Intel Core i7 12700K)
Intel Corp.
CPU (built-in hardware acceleration) H.265/HEVC Very-fast, Super-fast, Ultra-fast (60 fps, 120 fps, 240 fps) -
12 Intel QSV H.264 (Intel Core i7 12700K)
Intel Corp.
CPU (built-in hardware acceleration) H.264/AVC Very-fast, Super-fast, Ultra-fast (60 fps, 120 fps, 240 fps) -
13 AMD H.265 (Radeon RX6800)
AMD
GPU H.265/HEVC Very-fast, Super-fast, Ultra-fast (60 fps, 120 fps, 240 fps) 1.4.29, Windows
14 AMD H.264 (Radeon RX6800)
AMD
GPU H.264/AVC Very-fast, Super-fast, Ultra-fast (60 fps, 120 fps, 240 fps) 1.4.29, Windows


Comparison Rules


Hardware-accelerated and ultra-fast codecs testing objectives

The main goal of this report is the presentation of a comparative evaluation of the quality of new and existing codecs using objective measures of assessment. The comparison was done using settings provided by the developers of each codec. Nevertheless, we required all presets to satisfy minimum speed requirement on the particular use case. The main task of the comparison is to analyze different encoders for the task of transcoding video – e.g., compressing video for personal use.

Test Hardware Characteristics for GPU/ASIC encoders

  • CPU: Intel Core i7 12700K (Alder Lake)
  • SSD: 1Tb
  • RAM: 4x16GB (64GB)
  • OS: Windows 11 x64, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Test Hardware Characteristics for FPGA encoders

  • CPU: Intel Core i7 12700K (Alder Lake)
  • SSD: 1Tb
  • FPGA: Xilinx Alveo U250 Accelerator
  • RAM: 4x16GB (64GB)
  • OS: Windows 11 x64, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

See more on Call For Codecs 2022 page

Videos

Videos for testing set were chosen from MSU video collection via a voting among comparison participants, organizers and an independend expert.

Number of videos in MSU video collection
Year # FullHD videos # FullHD samples # 4K videos # 4K samples Total # of videos Total # of samples
2016 3 7 882 2902 885 2909
2017 1996 4638 1544 4561 3540 9299
2018 4342 10330 1946 5503 6288 15833
2020 4945 12402 2091 6016 7036 18418
2021 4945 12402 2091 6016 7036 18418
2022 7379 19546 2091 6016 9470 25562

Bitrate distribution of videos in MSU video collection Videos bitrate distribution

Final video set consists of 53 sequences including new videos from Vimeo and media.xiph.org derf's collection.


Video sequences selection

Descriptions of all test videos are presented in a separate PDF provided with the report.


Codec Analysis and Tuning for Codec Developers and Codec Users


Computer Graphics and Multimedia Laboratory of Moscow State University:

  • 17+ years working in the area of video codec analysis and tuning using objective quality metrics and subjective comparisons.
  • 30+ reports of video codec comparisons and analysis (H.265, H.264, AV1, VP9, MPEG-4, MPEG-2, decoders' error recovery).
  • Methods and algorithms for codec comparison and analysis development, separate codec's features and codec's options analysis.

Strong and Weak Points of Your Codec

  • Deep encoder parts analysis (ME, RC on GOP, mode decision, etc).
  • Weak and strong points for your encoder and complete information about encoding quality on different content types.
  • Encoding Quality improvement by the pre and post filtering (including technologies licensing).

Independent Codec Estimation Comparing to Other Codecs for Different Use-cases

  • Comparative analysis of your encoder and other encoders.
  • We have direct contact with many codec developers.
  • You will know place of your encoder between other newest well-known encoders (compare encoding quality, speed, bitrate handling, etc.).

Encoder Features Implementation Optimality Analysis

We perform encoder features effectiveness (speed/quality trade-off) analysis that could lead up to 30% increase in the speed/quality characteristics of your codec. We can help you to tune your codec and find best encoding parameters.

Thanks


Special thanks to the following contributors of our previous comparisons
Apple Google Intel NVidia
Huawei AMD Adobe Tencent
Zoom video communications Facebook Inc. Netflix Alibaba
KDDI R&D labs Dolby Tata Elxsi Octasic
Qualcomm Voceweb Elgato Telecast
ATI MainConcept Vitec dicas

Contact Information

We appreciate any feedback on our comparison


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Other Materials


Video resources:

Last updated: 12-May-2022


Server size: 8069 files, 1215Mb (Server statistics)

Project updated by
Server Team and MSU Video Group

Project sponsored by YUVsoft Corp.

Project supported by MSU Graphics & Media Lab