Mercury Playback Engine DOES accelerate frame decoding?!

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Maximus includes an additional processor, maybe that’s doing the crunching.

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[Tim Kolb]

No…decode is CPU-based at this point…though I suspect the migration will take place over time. My impression has been that highly parallel decode that is great for gaming tends to be optimized for speed over quality…which I love when I’m playing Halo, but my video projects need to have more quality-oriented compression.

Now…with that said, there are things to do beyond just reversing the compression of the video. Color sample interpolation (making 4:2:0 into 4:4:4, etc) and scaling (taking the 1920×1080 video and playing it back cleanly, but much smaller in the UI on your laptop) take a lot of horsepower and the GPU takes that load, allowing the CPU cores to dedicate more resources to decode…which allows more streams to play back on a given CPU…so the GPU helps without a question.

There are times however, when a user won’t get the salvation they seek for their under powered CPU from adding a GPU because they don’t understand this nuance and end up with a powerful GPU waiting for frames…and very little acceleration outside of FX preview.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor