My CPU is an AMD 5600X. My test video is 1080p 30fps, I’m trying to bring it down to 480p using AV1.

This is my first time playing with AV1. I bought an A310 to play around with because I read that the hardware encoder was faster than software, albeit lower quality and slightly larger.

Quality isn’t important to me, I have 700gb of 480i video that was saved at 1080p and inefficiently encoded, I want to reduce its size dramatically.

I’m using handbrake on Windows, and I chose AV1 SVT at first, and I average about 150fps, sometimes 120 sometimes 180. My CPU sits at 100%.

But if I choose AV1 Intel QSV, I average only about 40fps. And the GPU sits at 68%.

What am I missing? Thanks in advance

Edit: I found a thread from a year ago saying that encoding performance dropped after driver 4887, so I rolled way way back to 4885 from October 2023, and my performance almost doubled to 70-80 fps. But this is still far worse than SVT on CPU alone.

I read about a bug where the whole card can only be utilized if running two jobs simultaneously, so I tried this. The second job runs much slower, about 10-20fps. But that does bring me closer to 90-100fps combined, sometimes 🤷‍♂️

Something has got to be wrong, or maybe I’m expecting too much performance for the job I’m doing? I don’t have any special filters set up. You’d think encoding 1080 to 480 would be lightning fast.