Testing Intel Arrowlake Encoder

MsiMax October 29, 2024 2 min read

So I finally got around to testing the new Intel Arrow Lake CPU, I7 265K. I wanted to put the new media encoder through its paces since it seemed promising on paper.

I spent most of the weekend dedicated to testing and debugging the system, immersing myself in the intricate process. Throughout this time, I encountered numerous issues, including frustrating blue screens, troublesome screen corruption, and the complexity of setting up both OBS and Streamlabs OBS, which proved to be quite challenging. Despite these hurdles, I remained persistent and focused. However, once I successfully resolved all the bugs and issues, I was ultimately rewarded with an impressive array of encoding capabilities that significantly enhanced my streaming experience.

Test setup
CPU Intel Core 7 265K Arrow Lake
Thermal paste Splave One
Motherboard gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite Ice WiFi 7
Ram Vcolor 8600MHz DDR5 CU-Dimm
CPU cooler lan Li 360AIO
capture card Elgato 4K 60 pro
PSU G skill 1200 Watt
GPU gigabyte 6900 XTX Aorus Extreme

My first experience with Intel’s media engine started with the Arc A770 GPU, which offered 8K resolution at 60 frames per second and 12-bit HDR encoding, with up to 8K 10-bit HDR encoding.

The new Intel media engine offered on the Arrow Lake CPU has the same decoding specifications and includes SSC decode.

On the encoding side, it offers 8K 120 fps at 10-bit HDR with support for VP9, AVC, HEVC, AV1, and HEVC SSC encoding.

With those impressive specifications, I thought it might have significantly stronger performance, but there’s only one way to answer that question: I had to put it to the test. My first test over the weekend involved running a 4K stream using the slowest preset with just the CPU encoder. After that, I ran another test stream on Twitch utilizing the x264 encoder, which effectively leverages the CPU’s compute performance for better results.

4k 60fps test stream

X264 Test stream on Twitch

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2288189549?t=00h00m52s

As always, it’s still a work in progress, but it looks promising so far. I will report back with more detailed results as I continue testing and refining my setup.