Intel Quick Sync Video is

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware

core Core or cores may refer to: Science and technology * Core (anatomy), everything except the appendages * Core (manufacturing), used in casting and molding * Core (optical fiber), the signal-carrying portion of an optical fiber * Core, the centra ...

. Quick Sync was introduced with the

Sandy Bridge Sandy Bridge is the codename for Intel's 32 nm microarchitecture used in the second generation of the Intel Core processors (Core i7, i5, i3). The Sandy Bridge microarchitecture is the successor to Nehalem and Westmere microarchitecture. ...

CPU microarchitecture on 9 January 2011 and has been found on the die of Intel CPUs ever since. The name "Quick Sync" refers to the use case of quickly

transcoding Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video data files, audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target d ...

("converting") a video from, for example, a

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...

or Blu-ray Disc to a format appropriate to, for example, a

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...

. This becomes critically important in the professional video workplace, in which source material may have been shot in any number of video formats, all of which must be brought into a common format (commonly

H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distr ...

) for inter-cutting. Unlike video encoding on a CPU or a general-purpose GPU, Quick Sync is a dedicated hardware

on the processor die. This allows for much more power-efficient video processing.

Availability

Quick Sync Video is available on Core i3, Core i5 & Core i7 processors starting with Sandy Bridge, and Celeron & Pentium processors starting with Haswell,

Performance and quality

Like most desktop hardware-accelerated encoders, Quick Sync has been praised for its speed. The eighth annual MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video codecs comparison showed that Quick Sync was comparable to x264 superfast preset in terms of speed, compression ratio and quality ( SSIM); tests were performed on an Intel

Core i7 The following is a list of Intel Core i7 brand microprocessors. Introduced in 2008, the Core i7 line of microprocessors are intended to be used by high-end users. Desktop processors Nehalem microarchitecture (1st generation) "Bloomfield" ...

3770 ( Ivy Bridge) processor. However, Quick Sync could not be configured to spend more time to achieve higher quality, whereas x264 improved significantly when allowed to use more time using the recommended settings. A 2012 evaluation by AnandTech showed that QuickSync on Intel's Ivy Bridge produced similar image quality compared to the NVENC encoder on Nvidia's GTX 680 while performing much better at resolutions lower than 1080p.

Development

Quick Sync was first unveiled at Intel Developer Forum 2010 (September 13) but, according to ''Tom's Hardware'', Quick Sync had been conceptualized five years before that. The older Clarkdale microarchitecture had hardware video decoding support, but no hardware encoding support; it was known as

Intel Clear Video Intel Clear Video is a semiconductor intellectual property core which implements some steps of some video decompression algorithms. The scope is to calculate these on the SIP core rather than on the CPU. Intel Clear Video is paired with integrated ...

. ; Version 1 (

) : Quick Sync was initially built into some

CPUs, but not into Sandy Bridge Pentiums or Celerons. It adds H.264/AVC encoding and

VC-1 SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, ...

decoding acceleration. ; Version 2 ( Ivy Bridge, Bay Trail) : The Ivy Bridge microarchitecture included a "next-generation" implementation of Quick Sync. ; Version 3 ( Haswell) : The Haswell microarchitecture implementation adds H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2 encoding acceleration. An open-source hybrid driver was developed which supports partial

VP8 VP8 is an open and royalty-free video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008. Initially released as a proprietary successor to On2's previous VP7 format, VP8 was released as an open and royalty-free format in May 2010 after Goo ...

encoding and VP9 decoding acceleration under Linux by utilizing both the integrated GPU and CPU. ; Version 4 ( Broadwell) : The Broadwell microarchitecture adds VP8 hardware decoding. Also, it has two independent

bit stream decoder A bitstream format is the format of the data found in a stream (computing), stream of bits used in a digital communication or data storage device, data storage application. The term typically refers to the data format of the output of an encoder, ...

(BSD) rings to process video commands on GT3 GPUs; this allows one BSD ring to process decoding and the other BSD ring to process encoding at the same time. ; Version 5 ( Skylake) : The Skylake microarchitecture adds a full fixed-function H.265/HEVC main/8-bit encoding and decoding acceleration, hybrid and partial HEVC main10/10-bit decoding acceleration, JPEG encoding acceleration for resolutions up to 16,000×16,000 pixels, and partial VP9 encoding and decoding acceleration. ; Version 6 (

Kaby Lake Kaby Lake is Intel's codename for its seventh generation Core microprocessor family announced on August 30, 2016. Like the preceding Skylake, Kaby Lake is produced using a 14 nanometer manufacturing process technology. Breaking with Intel's ...

, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake, Comet Lake) : The

Coffee Lake Coffee Lake is Intel's codename for its eighth generation Core microprocessor family, announced on September 25, 2017. It is manufactured using Intel's second 14 nm process node refinement. Desktop Coffee Lake processors introduced i5 and ...

and Comet Lake microarchitecture adds full fixed-function H.265/HEVC Main10/10-bit encoding and decoding acceleration and full fixed-function VP9 8-bit and 10-bit decoding acceleration and 8-bit encoding acceleration. ; Version 7 (Ice Lake) : The

Ice Lake (microprocessor) Ice Lake is Intel's codename for the 10th generation Intel Core mobile and 3rd generation Xeon Scalable server processors based on the Sunny Cove microarchitecture. Ice Lake represents an Architecture step in Intel's Process-Architecture-Op ...

adds VP9 4:4:4 decoding, VP9 encoding (up to 10-bit and 4:4:4), HEVC 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 decoding and encoding, HDR10 Tone Mapping and Open Source Media Shaders. HEVC hardware encoding quality has also been improved. ; Version 8 (Tiger Lake, Rocket Lake, Alder Lake, Raptor Lake) : The Tiger Lake (microprocessor), Rocket Lake,

Alder Lake Alder Lake is Intel's codename for the 12th generation of Intel Core processors based on a hybrid architecture utilizing Golden Cove performance cores and Gracemont efficient cores. It is fabricated using Intel's Intel 7 process, previousl ...

Raptor Lake Raptor Lake is Intel's codename for the 13th-generation of Intel Core processors based on a hybrid architecture, utilizing Raptor Cove performance cores and Gracemont efficient cores. Raptor Lake launched on October 20, 2022. Mobile versions ...

adds VP9 12-bit & 12-bit 4:4:4 hardware decoding and HEVC 12-bit 4:2:0, 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 hardware decoding. Gen12 Xe will also support native AV1 decode, which includes 10-bit 4:2:0 16K stills and 10-bit 4:2:0 8K, 4K and 2K video. Hardware encoding for VP8 was dropped and hardware decoding is only available on Tiger Lake. ; Version 9 (Intel Arc Alchemist, Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake) : Intel Arc Alchemist (discrete GPUs) adds 8K 10-bit AV1 hardware encoding.

Operating system support

The Quick Sync Video SIP core needs to be supported by the device driver. The device driver provides one or more interfaces, for example

VDPAU Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) is a royalty-free application programming interface (API) as well as its implementation as free and open-source library () distributed under the MIT License. VDPAU is also supported by Nvidia. Th ...

, Video Acceleration API (VA-API) or

DXVA DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) is a Microsoft API specification for the Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 platforms that allows video decoding to be hardware-accelerated. The pipeline allows certain CPU-intensive operations such as iDCT, motio ...

for video decoding, and

OpenMAX IL OpenMAX (Open Media Acceleration), often shortened as "OMX", is a non-proprietary and royalty-free cross-platform set of C (programming language), C-language programming interfaces. It provides abstractions for routines that are especially useful ...

or VA API for video encoding. One of these interfaces is then used by end-user software, for example

VLC media player VLC media player (previously the VideoLAN Client and commonly known as simply VLC) is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. VLC is available for desk ...

GStreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes the ...

, to access the Quick Sync Video hardware and make use of it.

Linux

Quick Sync support on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

is available by both Intel VAAPI Driver (legacy, pre-Broadwell) and Intel Media Driver (Broadwell and newer) which also uses

VA-API Video Acceleration API (VA-API) is an open source application programming interface that allows applications such as VLC media player or GStreamer to use hardware video acceleration capabilities, usually provided by the graphics processing unit ...

, and through the Intel Media SDK. it is supported by Wowza Streaming Engine (formerly known as Wowza Media Server) for transcoding of media streams using their transcoder add-on.

Windows

Microsoft offers support for Quick Sync in Windows (in

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

and later) based on supporting driver software from Intel and support through both DirectX as well as WMF (

Windows Media Foundation Media Foundation (MF) is a COM-based multimedia framework pipeline and infrastructure platform for digital media in Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows 11. It is the intended replacement for Microsoft Direct ...

). A wide range of applications are based upon this base support for the technology in Windows.

macOS

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...

added Quick Sync support in

OS X Mountain Lion OS X Mountain Lion (version 10.8) is the ninth major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. OS X Mountain Lion was released on July 25, 2012, for purchase and download through Apple's Mac Ap ...

for

AirPlay Airplay is how frequently a song is being played through broadcasting on radio stations. A song which is being played several times every day (spins) would have a significant amount of airplay. Music which became very popular on jukeboxes, in n ...

FaceTime FaceTime is a proprietary videotelephony product developed by Apple Inc. FaceTime is available on supported iOS mobile devices running iOS 4 and later and Mac computers that run and later. FaceTime supports any iOS device with a forward-faci ...

, iTunes, Safari, QuickTime X, iMovie,

Final Cut Pro X Final Cut Pro is a series of non-linear editing, non-linear video editing software programs first developed by Macromedia, Macromedia Inc. and later Apple Inc. The most recent version, Final Cut Pro 10.6.4, runs on Macintosh, Mac computers power ...

Motion In physics, motion is the phenomenon in which an object changes its position with respect to time. Motion is mathematically described in terms of displacement, distance, velocity, acceleration, speed and frame of reference to an observer and m ...

and Compressor. Third party software includes Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Media Encoder,

DaVinci Resolve DaVinci Resolve (originally known as da Vinci Resolve) is a color grading, color correction, visual effects, and audio post-production video editing application for macOS, Windows, and Linux, originally developed by da Vinci Systems, and now ...

and others.

Hardware decoding and encoding

Support for Quick Sync hardware accelerated decoding of H.264, MPEG-2, and VC-1 video is widely available. One common way to gain access to the technology on Microsoft Windows is by use of the free ffdshow filter. Some other free software like

(since version 2.1.0 "Rincewind") supports Quick Sync as well. Many commercial applications also benefit from the technology today, including CyberLink

PowerDVD CyberLink PowerDVD is a universal media player for movie discs, video files, photos and music. During 2016, PowerDVD achieved certification from the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) for the playback of Ultra HD Blu-ray Discs, and became the world's ...

, CyberLink PowerDirector and MacroMotion Bogart "gold" edition. According to the ffdshow documentation, Quick Sync has very low CPU utilization while being about twice as fast as libavcodec. Support for hardware-assisted media encoding tailored for Quick Sync is widely available. Examples of such software with Quick Sync support during encoding processes ar
Emby Media Server
Plex Media Server, Badaboom Media Converter, CyberLink MediaShow, CyberLink MediaEspresso, ArcSoft MediaConverter,

MAGIX Magix (or MAGIX Software) is a German software company specializing in video editing, audio editing, DAW and photo slideshow software. The company is based in Berlin, with locations in Madison, Wisconsin, Dresden and Lübbecke, as well as Hui ...

Video Pro X, Pinnacle Studio (since version 18),

Roxio Toast Roxio Toast is an optical disc authoring and media conversion software application for Mac OS X. Its name is a play on the word ''burn'', a term used for the writing of information onto a disc through the use of a laser. Discs can be burned ...

Roxio Creator Roxio is an American software company specializing in developing consumer digital media products. Its product line includes tools for setting up digital media projects, media conversion software and content distribution systems. The company formed ...

, XSplit Broadcaster, XSplit Gamecaster (all commercial) and projects like HandBrake,

Open Broadcaster Software OBS Studio (also Open Broadcaster Software or OBS, for short) is a free, open-source, and cross-platform screencasting and streaming app. It is available for Windows, macOS, Linux distributions, and BSD. The OBS Project raises funds on the ...

or applications for operation with a video content entering in Adobe CC2018. The following table shows fixed-function encode/decode support for various Intel platforms. Support for hybrid and/or partial decode/encode are not detailed. Certain low-end and high-end parts (including multi-socket

Xeon Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same a ...

s and some Extreme Edition CPUs expected to be used with a dedicated GPU) do not contain the hardware core to support Quick Sync.

References

External links

* {{Intel Quick Sync Video Video conversion software Video acceleration Video compression and decompression ASIC

Availability

Performance and quality

Development

Operating system support

Linux

Windows

macOS

Hardware decoding and encoding

See also

Hardware video hardware technologies

AMD

Intel

Nvidia

Others

References

External links