Intel Quick Sync Video

Intel Quick Sync Video is Intel's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core. Quick Sync was introduced with the Sandy Bridge CPU microarchitecture on 9 January 2011, and has been found on the die of Intel products ever since.

The name "Quick Sync" refers to the use case of quickly transcoding ("syncing") a video from, for example, a DVD or Blu-ray Disc to a format appropriate to, for example, a smartphone.

Unlike video encoding on a CPU or a general-purpose GPU, Quick Sync is a dedicated hardware core on the processor die. This allows for a much more power efficient video processing.

Quick Sync has been praised for its speed. The eighth annual MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video codecs comparison showed that Quick Sync is comparable to x264 superfast preset in terms of speed, compression ratio and quality (SSIM); tests were performed on an Intel Core i7 3770 (Ivy Bridge) processor. A benchmark from Tom's Hardware showed in 2011 that Quick Sync could convert a 449 MB, four-minute 1080p file to 1024×768 in 22 seconds. The same encoding using only software took 172 seconds but it is not clear what software encoder was used and how it was configured. The same encoding took 83 or 86 seconds GPU-assisted, using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 and an AMD Radeon HD 6870, respectively, both of which were at that time (five years ago) contemporary high-end GPUs. Quick Sync encoding can produce image quality which varies based on how well the software is written.

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