Is hardware video decode on hold?
Hi,
I'm really looking forward to hopefully one day having hardware decode (H.264/HEVC) as I'm streaming games from my windows server to play them on my mac. I see it's "WIP" in the feature list, but all I can find related to it is elin/avd.git which has been inactive for a while. It is on pause for the time being?
-- more about my situation: --
Even with software decoding my M1 pro is handling it insanely well - very consistent 1440@60fps with a bitrate of 40mbps. It's very comfortable to play slower pased games, even Sekiro is reasonably smooth. But the 14-16ms decoding time unfortunately makes fast-pase competitive games pretty sluggish.
Any advice would be appreciated, I don't even know if hardware encoding would fix my issue, though the decode time is the biggest bottleneck by far.
I get about 200-300 mbps with 2ms latency to the windows server, I've never dropped more than 0.00% packets so very nice and stable connection. I've tried both H.264 and HEVC, played with the bitrate, resolution and frame rate, but decoding time doesn't improve to the point where it matters beyond 1440@60fps. It also only uses ~10% of my CPU when running.
I've tried Sunshine/Moonlight and Steam's streaming feature so far, I'd love suggestions if you have one you love.
I might test with hardware encoding with native macOS to see if it makes a big enough different. I don't know what latency I need to make CS2 for example feel "smooth" but I imagine it's around 5-10ms?
Edit: Found another PC and tried the setup with hardware acceleration, 0.4ms decode time, total render time is 3ms with 1440@60fps using a HP probook 430 G6... It uses 5% CPU and the HP is a piece of shit compared to my Mac. Hardware decoding will definitely fix my issues.