Anyway, I *believe* VP9 uses SSE4 at the very least because the Core i series CPUs are far more efficient at decoding it than pr […]
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Anyway, I *believe* VP9 uses SSE4 at the very least because the Core i series CPUs are far more efficient at decoding it than previous CPUs. I "benchmarked" a few of my CPUs by playing back VP9 encoded YouTube video using Chrome's HTML5 player, and the results were quite interesting.
Opteron 185 (2C/2T, 3GHz OC, SSE3, GTX 560)
720p: 40% average CPU utilization
1080p: 85%
720p/60: 95% and still completely smooth
1080p/60: 100%, playing back at roughly half the frame rate.
Core 2 Quad Q6700 (4C/4T, 3.33GHz OC, S-SSE3, GTX 560)
720p: 20%
1080p: 45%
720p/60: 35% (Not sure why 720p/60 uses less CPU time than 1080/30 in this case, but it is what it is)
1080p/60: 92%
Core i7 4930K (6C/12T, 4.5GHz OC, SSE4 & AVX, GTX 970)
720p: 0-1%
1080p: 1-2%
720p/60: 1-2%
1080p/60: 2-3%
The very low CPU usage on the i7 is what made me initially believe that VP9 was hardware accelerated. However, GPU-Z shows zero load on the GPU's Video Engine during playback, and according to everything I've read, no GPU currently offloads VP9. I remember SSE giving software MPEG-2 a huge boost back in the day, perhaps SSE4 is doing the same thing with modern codecs.