Intel NUC13 Extreme Raptor Canyon Review: Sizzling SFF Performance Powerhouse

HTPC Credentials

The 2022 Q4 update to our system reviews brings an updated HTPC evaluation suite for systems. After doing away with the evaluation of display refresh rate stability and Netflix streaming evaluation, the local media playback configurations have also seen a revamp. This section details each of the workloads processed on the Intel NUC13RNGi9 (Raptor Canyon) as part of the HTPC suite.

YouTube Streaming Efficiency

YouTube continues to remain one of the top OTT platforms, primarily due to its free ad-supported tier. Our HTPC test suite update retains YouTube streaming efficiency evaluation as a metric of OTT support in different systems. Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video is the chosen test sample. On PCs running Windows, it is recommended that HDR streaming videos be viewed using the Microsoft Edge browser after putting the desktop in HDR mode.

YouTube Streaming Statistics

The GPU in Intel NUC13RNGi9 (Raptor Canyon) supports hardware decoding of VP9 Profile 2, and we see the stream encoded with that codec being played back. The streaming is perfect, thanks to the powerful GPU and hardware decoding support - the couple of dropped frames observed in the statistics below are due to mouse clicks involved in bringing up the overlay.

The streaming efficiency-related aspects such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption are also graphed below.

The Raptor Canyon NUC consumes around 150W in the steady state for YouTube 4Kp60 HDR playback. Total energy consumption for the workload was estimated to be 13.75 Wh.

Hardware-Accelerated Encoding and Decoding

The transcoding benchmarks in the systems performance section presented results from evaluating the QuickSync and NVENC encoders within Handbrake's framework. The capabilities of the decoder engine are brought out by DXVAChecker.

Video Decoding Hardware Acceleration in Intel NUC13RNGi9 (Raptor Canyon)

Both GPUs support hardware decode of all common codecs, including AV1 up to 8K.

Local Media Playback

Evaluation of local media playback and video processing is done by playing back files encompassing a range of relevant codecs, containers, resolutions, and frame rates. A note of the efficiency is also made by tracking GPU usage and power consumption of the system at the wall. Users have their own preference for the playback software / decoder / renderer, and our aim is to have numbers representative of commonly encountered scenarios. Our Q4 2022 test suite update replaces MPC-HC (in LAV filters / madVR modes) with mpv. In addition to being cross-platform and open-source, the player allows easy control via the command-line to enable different shader-based post-processing algorithms. From a benchmarking perspective, the more attractive aspect is the real-time reporting of dropped frames in an easily parseable manner. The players / configurations considered in this subsection include:

• VLC 3.0.18
• Kodi 20.0b1
• mpv 0.35 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next)
• mpv 0.35 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next, profile=gpu-hq)

Fourteen test streams (each of 90s duration) were played back from the local disk with an interval of 30 seconds in-between. Various metrics including GPU usage, at-wall power consumption, and total energy consumption were recorded during the course of this playback.

All our playback tests were done with the desktop HDR setting turned on. It is possible for certain system configurations to automatically turn on/off the HDR capabilities prior to the playback of a HDR video, but, we didn't take advantage of that in our testing.

VLC is unable to decode the AV1 clip in hardware, and software decode pushes up at-wall power consumption to 300+ W. Total energy consumption for the workload was determined to be 40.94 Wh.

Similar to VLC, Kodi too was unable to decode AV1 in hardware. Total energy consumption for the workload was determined to be 45.94 Wh.

mpv is able to activate AV1 decoding in hardware, as we see video decoder usage shoot up to 60% for that. Total energy consumption was determined to be 37.19 Wh.

Turning on the GPU scaling algorithms drives up the power consumption numbers a bit. There were no dropped frames, though - only to be expected for a RTX 3080 Ti in the system. Total energy consumption was determined to be 39.38 Wh.

Our plan is to evaluate energy consumption numbers for different local media playback scenarios with different systems in order to determine HTPC efficiency moving forward.