• douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Yeah, because of the ASICs built into them to enable that decoding.

    Without that, a 4K HEVC video is in upwards of 100+ billion operations/s to decode on the CPU. Which limits you to high end CPUs getting capped out on something you essentially get for “free” otherwise

    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      I meant without dedicated circuits, obviously. Can’t it be parallelised? Many cpus have a lot of relatively idle cores at a given time…

      I remember that my 486 had trouble with mp3 files, but soon enough, I got a new machine with many more spare cycles.

      • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        That is parallelized… I didn’t make mention of threading being the concern here.

        The 100+ billion operations per second isn’t exactly easy.

        4k 60fps = 498 million pixels per second

        Each pixel takes a couple hundred logical operations with HEVC.

        A modern high end 4GHz, 8 physical core CPU at 4 instructions per cycle, at maximum capacity, can handle 128 billion operations per second.

        You probably wouldn’t even get your realtime framerate in this scenario.