I find that generally the motherboard manufacturer-supplied drivers for their embedded Intel igpus are more reliable than the generics supplied by Intel. I always check for mobo driver updates whenever an Intel update is available and keep it on hand if the Intel-supplied update negatively effects anything including benchmarks. As a result I've needed to revert to manufacturer-specific drivers on my Intel Hades Canyon Nuc and Dell xps-15 but get better results with Intel-supplied generic drivers on my Asus XI mobo. Note that even Intel's own hardware doesn't like it's generic video drivers.

To answer the question posted before- I downloaded HandBrake and was able to render with QSV using this same non-OEM Intel driver (at least as far as I can tell- don't see "encode" in Windows task manager, but think it would be grayed out if Handbrake couldn't access QSV).



About the external monitor- you can probably guess from my dual screen screenshots but I always have one attached. (I do freelance color correction so don't do anything color critical on a laptop screen)

@RogerS If you encode using Mainconcept non HW encode, then try QSV and its wayyy faster then you have QSV HW encoding, via HB or my util.

That is a good idea.

I rendered the same 1:11 file (4K to HD conversion) in Handbrake.

The x.264 (Intel QSV) at 10 QP and the other at x264 10 RF. The QSV completed in 1:00 and the x.264 at 1:55. The x264 file is twice as big, though so I did it a second time with QSV encoder preset set to "quality" it finished in 1:31 but is 10 times bigger (1.68GB vs 127MB the first time). So I have no idea how to make them comparable but am pretty sure this means QSV is working as the encoder settings are different from x264 and it's fast.

Did NVENC too (why not), set to the setting one before slow (so next to highest quality for preset and constant quality 10). It finished in 0:57 for a 1GB file.

@RogerS Given your Nvenc and QSV are similar times, its a certainty that QSV HW encoding is working for you, but not in VP.

I'm at a loss why you can’t use the same test file for all Cpu, Qsv and Nvenc testing? If u use my ffmpeg based util you can do all 3 encodes and you should see that the CPU encode will be much longer. You can modify the Quality for the different encoders to give similar sized output file. The quality setting will give a slightly different output size, data rate, for the same setting, so the need to change.

Yes, I think that conclusion is correct that QSV is working with the generic GPU driver, but just not in Vegas.

The test media is the same, but I don't understand Handbrake well enough to get a resulting file of similar sizes. The options appear quite different across encoders.

@RogerS Thats ok, the result is what counts, using my util, theres really no learning curve, its all on the single screen. Anyway, over to Magix.

Just a small addendum for AMD graphics users.

Intel QSV is missing in Vegas Pro 18. But the AMD decoder (not encoder) cannot properly handle (X)AVC, resulting in plugins flickering on and off, colors degraded. This means any source media in (X)AVC I have to edit in Vegas Pro 17.