Do I need to bother with igpu?

[m0rb1u5]

Hi all
After some welcome suggestions on the Catalina Support forum, my Hackintosh is now working 100% after a few teething issues (my own fault!) and I am well impressed with its performance after a month with no problems.
I have started messing about with re-purposing some of the 4k movies I own into 1080p for playing through guest room tv and have been trying out Handbrake.
This works really well and the results are good quality. I notice when it's running that it is solely using the CPU (9900k) and no GPU utilisation at all (RX580).
A quick google seems to suggest this is normal (?), but many say that activating the 9900k's igpu will speed things up dramatically.
Do you guys think I need to bother with this? I've just tested a 61gig file re-encoding down using Fast1080p30 preset and it only took 59 mins all in which I think is pretty impressive so it's no big hardship to leave it doing its thing, but I am curious if activating the 9900k's igpu will make a difference?
And if it will, is there a guide on here on how to do it?
Many thanks

 

[jaymonkey]

Do you guys think I need to bother with this? ..... is there a guide on here on how to do it ?

@m0rb1u5,

It depends on the SMBIOS your are using ...

If your using a iMac19,X SMBIOS which is optimised to use Intel Quick Sync for Video and JPG encode/decode, Airplay, Sidecar ..etc then your IGPU should be enabled in the BIOS and configured as Headless.

If you need guidance on Headless IGPU configurations then see the relevant section of this guide :-

An iDiot's Guide To Lilu and its Plug-ins

An iDiot's Guide To Lilu and its Plug-in's Last Update: 22nd Jan 2021 (Add note about OpenCore config.plist modifications) About this Guide Note: This guide was written when Clover was the boot loader of choice as such the config.plist examples in this guide are mostley Clover specific ... if...

www.tonymacx86.com

Conversely, if your using the iMacPro1,1 SMBIOS which is optimised to use a AMD dGPU for Video and JPG encode/decode, Airplay, Sidecar ..etc, then the IGPU should be disabled in the BIOS.

Cheers
Jay

 

[Shiitaki]

Hi all
After some welcome suggestions on the Catalina Support forum, my Hackintosh is now working 100% after a few teething issues (my own fault!) and I am well impressed with its performance after a month with no problems.
I have started messing about with re-purposing some of the 4k movies I own into 1080p for playing through guest room tv and have been trying out Handbrake.
This works really well and the results are good quality. I notice when it's running that it is solely using the CPU (9900k) and no GPU utilisation at all (RX580).
A quick google seems to suggest this is normal (?), but many say that activating the 9900k's igpu will speed things up dramatically.
Do you guys think I need to bother with this? I've just tested a 61gig file re-encoding down using Fast1080p30 preset and it only took 59 mins all in which I think is pretty impressive so it's no big hardship to leave it doing its thing, but I am curious if activating the 9900k's igpu will make a difference?
And if it will, is there a guide on here on how to do it?
Many thanks

If you like the way it's running then don't worry about it. Apple's software relies on the Intel IGPU on machines that come with it because Intel built in a great video decompressor/compressor in hardware that runs way faster than doing on the main processor with a minor loss of quality. If used it should be quite a bit faster, but enabling it can be a pain and it won't support all codecs or settings for the codecs it does support since you are limited by the hardware codec.

You can only use the IGPU with system definitions that included the IGPU in real Macs, which is most of them, but a lot of people like to use the iMac Pro because it solves some problems like DRM for Apple Movies and JPEGs files displaying.