• douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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      8 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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        7 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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          43 minutes 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.