Some form of hardware acceleration is all-but-mandatory for playing 4K video, especially high bitrate H.265. Nowadays H.265 decoding is commonplace (you need to go all the way back to 2015 to find a CPU or GPU that can't decode HEVC Main10), but presumably as the world transitions to AV1 the same will apply.
Hardware accelerated decode in web browsers on Linux
It works! Well, sort of. On my test machine with an i3-12100F and an ancient Polaris 12 (AMD) GPU running the open source drivers, 1080p H.264 content is properly decoded by UVD but 4K60 VP9 (the famous '4K Costa Rica' demo clip on Youtube) is not. CPU usage seems a bit high in either case, about half a core in the former and 1-2 cores in the latter.
Decode on integrated graphics, display connected to discrete graphics
An esoteric use case. I ran into the H.265 version (!); I had a M4000 I wanted to use for Solidworks and the M4000 does not support HEVC decode, but the iGPU on the i5-12600 it was paired with does.
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work. iGPU usage remained zero and the M4000 ran in some sort of weird hybrid decoding mode. Performance, however, was acceptable.
Decode in integrated graphics, multiple GPUs and displays
Can we fix the above by plugging the monitor into the iGPU? The behavior is strange:
Both GPUs are now at 30% usage, but the CPU usage has gone through the roof. Very bad indeed, but possibly fixable with enough effort.
Remarkably, even in this bugged state the Costa Rica clip runs at 60 fps.
VLC + H.265, but the decoding is supposed to be done on the integrated graphics
Unfortunately, the iGPU chooses not to participate, but the hybrid decoding seems to work fine, playing back 4K24 high bitrate video with about 12% CPU usage. It's worth noting however that this is 12% of a 4.8GHz hex core Alder Lake, which is like..an entire laptop CPU from not that long ago or two whole 3GHz Skylake cores.
Heavy decode on integrated graphics
Surprisingly good. On my Kaby Lake laptop, the CPU is able to keep up with about 25% usage while remaining throttled to ~1.6 GHz on battery - the fixed function hardware really does the heavy lifting here and keeps the power consumption down.
Hardware accelerated decode, but there are many cores
The test system was a Epyc 7702 with an RTX 3060, by all means close to the state of the art. I didn't expect problems here, and didn't find any; the 3060 ran at heavy usage on the Costa Rica clip and the CPU was basically idle.
It's unclear what the actual CPU usage was; Task Manager lacks the granularity to deal with so many cores since even 1% is almost an entire core.
