Do note that the OP talked about 3D audio formats where as 3D-MVC is video.
As per a NUC, a friend of mine just recently bought a 12th generation NUC (the original form factor, not the Enthusiast nor Pro) and it performs quite well. In reality, it is the GPU and OS that matter more than the CPU for this case. I’ll touch on some of the decision points:
- OS: I’d only recommend Windows at this time. MacOS has a tendency to be lacking support for things (it may still be lacking HD-audio passthrough but I haven’t checked in years) and Linux lacks HDR.
- Audio: Just use passthrough and everything goes to your AVR to decode.
- GPU:
- Intel: These work well for the low to mid range. I’d highly recommend not getting an
UHD Graphicsline but instead aIris Xe. I’ve not played withARCbut I expect it’ll outperform theIris Xeline. - NVIDIA: These GPUs generally work well but there do seem to be some quirks. Some game settings can interfere with HTPC so it is better that it run with mostly default settings. The power management sometimes can cause a frame drop as seemingly does the default D3D11 swapchain depth. You can find discussion of this elsewhere in the forums.
- AMD: I can’t speak to this too much personally so I’ll leave it to others.
- Intel: These work well for the low to mid range. I’d highly recommend not getting an
- Quality Presets: These presets control some post processing (such as debanding) but most of effect is in the scalers (such as upscaling 1080p → 4k). These are why I recommend against an
Intel UHD Graphicsseries because these GPUs can’t do much in this regard. Of the GPUs I’ve seen:- My friend is testing out a new 12th gen
Iris XeGPU with 96EU and it seems to play content at theUltraquality preset in HTPC without issue. Some content can be played at theMake My GPU Hurtpreset but not all. - My experience with an 11th gen is similar
- NVIDIA RTX 2060: appears to play everything I’ve thrown at it at
Make My GPU Hurt.
- My friend is testing out a new 12th gen
- Render mechanism: This is the graphics API that’s used. Currently only Windows has a choice here:
- ANGLE: This is the old mechanism which should only be used on low power GPUs. For some inexplicable reason, it performs better for these low power GPUs on the lower quality presets.
- D3D11: This is the default in HTPC. It seems to have the aforementioned quirks but generally works well.
- Vulkan: Currently only available by settings options in the
mpv.confand should only be used on NVIDIA GPUs because others have to copy video data from the GPU → CPU → GPU currently (hopefully this will changes after Vulkan puts out a video decoding API in the near future). This appears to be much more efficient on the GPU’s usage.
- Video Decode: For most cases, the hardware decode of these GPUs is nearly identical. The current notable difference is AV1 which requires at least an RDNA2 AMD GPU, 11th generation Intel, or 30x0 series NVIDIA
- Dolby Vision: Currently HTPC ignores the DV metadata due to licensing concerns. I expect this will not change because Dolby won’t change. However, depend on your source content, this may not make a difference. The MPV devs have pointed out many times that there are only 5 UHD BD disks that have any enhancement at all on the DV layer. So for playing content from (all by these 5) UHD BD disks HDR10 vs DV yield identical results.
