How Intel® Arc™ Graphics Help You Stream and Share Your Game

Beyond raw graphical power, Intel® Arc™ graphics unlock AV1 and Intel® Deep Link technologies to give you a boost when streaming and creating content.

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When you boot up a system with Intel® Arc™ graphics, you gain access to an array of technologies that improve the experience of streaming and sharing video content. These technologies include:

  • AI-powered streaming and capture features, found within the Intel® Arc™ Control application.
  • Stream Assist, which maximizes your frame rates while streaming.
  • Hyper Encode, which accelerates the process of exporting captured video.
  • AV1 support, which lets you stream and quickly export ultra high-resolution, high-FPS video by taking advantage of more efficient data compression.

Whether you’re a casual streamer or a pro content creator, these advancements make it easier to share great-looking gameplay. Here’s how Intel® Arc™ graphics solutions can benefit your livestreams and uploads.

Stream Like a Pro with Intel® Arc™ Control

The Intel® Arc™ Control companion application has built-in streaming functionality. You can launch a stream from within the app directly, gaining access to a suite of useful streaming features simply by turning them on in the interface.

Features like Virtual Green Screen, Auto-Frame, and Sharp Stream help both you and your game shine on-screen, while Auto Game Highlights aids with captures.

If you’d rather stream using other streaming software, the good news is these features interface with supported streaming apps and video conferencing applications, easily integrating into your existing setup.

Maximize Frame Rates with Stream Assist

Streaming a game requires additional performance because your system pulls double-duty to run the game and encode streaming video. Laptops and desktops with Intel® Arc™ graphics have a feature called Stream Assist that helps keep your FPS high by allocating streaming-related tasks more efficiently.

Stream Assist keeps your FPS high by allocating streaming-related tasks more efficiently.

An Intel® Deep Link technology, Stream Assist reroutes streaming tasks from the discrete GPU to a separate graphical engine: the integrated GPU. In short, your system delegates the workload to two processors.

Since streaming tasks are being processed on separate hardware, the discrete GPU can dedicate more of its resources to outputting frames. As a result, you can get more gaming performance while streaming.

Many popular streaming applications take advantage of Stream Assist, including Intel® Arc™ Control and streaming apps from Intel’s partners. When you use the background replacement feature in Intel® Arc™ Control, for example, the task of inference — during which the neural network calculates how to properly cut out sections of the image — is performed on the integrated GPU, leaving the game’s FPS virtually unaffected.

Create Gaming Content with Hyper Encode

If you edit and produce video content to share online, Intel® Arc™ graphics can help you do more in less time. Automatically enabled on systems with Intel® Arc™ graphics, Intel® Deep Link.

Similar to Stream Assist technology, Hyper Encode takes advantage of optimized Xe HPG microarchitecture to divide and conquer encoding workloads. Once your content is edited and ready to export, the system utilizes both the discrete and integrated GPUs to complete the encode.

This parallel processing can be particularly useful when sharing gaming videos online. Hyper Encode can cut the time spent waiting to export particularly demanding longform videos, like walkthroughs or Let’s Plays, or videos in high resolutions.

It is also advantageous in the event you need to export multiple segments from a longer video. For example, Hyper Encode is perfect for content creators who want to upload multiple clips from a single livestream to social channels. Whatever your workflow calls for, Hyper Encode lets you share gameplay fast.

AV1 Support

Another important feature going forward is AV1 support. AV1 is a next-generation video codec capable of delivering outstanding image fidelity at reduced bitrates, and it comes embedded in Intel® Arc™ graphics hardware. In fact, Intel® Arc™ GPUs are the first to offer hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding and decoding.

AV1 works its magic by compressing video in an efficient manner, allowing high-quality, high-resolution video to be transmitted over the internet while avoiding bottlenecks. As a result, the video retains its quality when it reaches its destination and is decompressed.

Intel® Arc™ GPUs have the added benefit of utilizing hardware-accelerated encoding to further improve streams.

AV1 support also benefits creators who produce pre-recorded video content. You can capture video at a high quality — for instance, in ultra high-resolution at a high frame rate — then encode it using AV1 for efficient storage and fast uploads to video-sharing platforms.

Stream and Share Your Game with Intel® Arc™ Graphics

Intel® Arc™ graphics give you improved performance, upgraded image quality, and expanded functionality for streaming and sharing content. With Intel® Arc™ Control, Stream Assist, Hyper Encode, and AV1 encode support, Intel® Arc™ GPUs help your streams and video content stand out from the crowd.

To elevate your game streams and creative endeavors, upgrade to a laptop with Intel® Arc™ graphics. On desktop, a discrete Intel® Arc™ GPU must be paired with the latest Intel® Core™ processor or newer to take advantage of most of these features. For the ultimate in gaming and content creation performance, opt for a system with Intel® Arc™ A-Series Graphics.