TECHNICAL
The broader implication is a very serious one. Improvements in QoE are most viable when tiers that already work well under good connectivity conditions, such as premium 4K (but not necessarily other high definition), need to be fine-tuned. Rather, the top quartile will endure the greatest impact on customers from doubling down on the low-hanging fruit where network constraints become most apparent. We observed a similar behaviour with Intel QuickSync. In H.265, this translation improved 576p from 62.47 to 91.93 in VMAF (56–108), and lower tiers like 432p and 360p also gained substantially. Overall, these results show that content-adaptive optimisation can significantly compress the perceptual quality cliff associated with resolution reduction. The QoE Optimisation Pyramid Considering everything together, the findings provide a greater understanding of a media- independent QoE strategic framework for modern-day QoE optimisation. At the very summit of the QoE stack, peak quality delivery: 4K and HDR plus premium- tier experiences aimed squarely at users with top-level connectivity. These continue to be key aspects of brand mapping and premium monetisation, yet the incremental gains in consumer-facing quality are generally small as baseline conditions for both have often been positive.
operators to deliver superior viewing experiences while meeting the constraints of their network environments. The H.264 findings may be even more commercially salient. With the continued growth of HEVC and AV1 adoption, H.264 is still the dominant codec across much of the streaming ecosystem worldwide because it works on so many devices and has broad industry support. According to the study, H.264 software decoding increased from 86.49 VMAF to 93.04 VMAF at 1080p and raised it from 81.92 VMAF to 88.79 VMAF at 720p and 73.64 VMAF to 80.48 VMAF at 540p of H.Media software encoding gains, showing operators are able to deliver perceptual quality and higher meaningful improvements without requiring premature codec migration or infrastructure replacement. The most prominent takeaway is that content- adaptive optimisation allows established transcoding platforms to deliver quantifiable QoE gains without sacrificing bandwidth efficiency. Instead of relying on new codecs or a bigger network pipe, operators can improve processing by using their encoding pipeline more intelligently. With the growth of streaming volumes and an increasing number of television services transitioning to IP delivery, technologies like these provide an effective way to improve service quality without changing the basic distribution architecture.
Hardware Acceleration is No Longer a Quality Compromise
Then lies adaptive stability — really the 720p and 1080p layers, in which stability across
The results for the GPU-accelerated NVIDIA NVENC are interesting, because they lend further weight to the premise that hardware acceleration does so at a loss in quality — something which we have assumed since day 1. With each game encode in H.265 mode, the 1080p profile gained 7.83 VMAF points; the 720p profile by more than 11 points and finally that of the 360p garnered over a score increase of at least 15 points as well. We saw a similar behaviour in testing H.264, where the 360p tier gained more than 15 VMAF points. Those are not tiny engineering advances. They are the difference between a portable experience that consumers regard as unwatchable and one that they consider stable and viewable. The results from the NETINT ASIC only strengthen this. For 432p, the 20-point improvement in VMAF with H.265 is nearly half the max, and for 360p more than an 18-point improvement separates it from max. Correlation with 360p improved much more
changing devices, along with varying bandwidth and Wi-Fi conditions, is ever more vital.
Peak Quality Layer (4K / HDR / Premium) Marginal QoE gains
Adaptive Stability Layer (720p – 1080p) Consistency across devices
Minimum Quality Floor (360p – 576p) Largest QoE impact Critical for mobile users
dramatically — a jump from 45.09 to 63.67 VMAF for H.264 performance.
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