eli5 Why does GPU heats and use fan to cooldown while processing 8k video on PC and there is no single fan in a TV and still process 8k/4k videos?

1.55K views

In short, why does the the TV doesn’t need a fan to cooldown and PC requires one while dealing with high definition videos?

In: 1359

44 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

TVs are designed especially to do one thing and do it well, while PCs are very much general purpose machines. A PC can do anything “computer” that you ask of it, a TV can’t. That’s why every now and then you have to throw out your TV, e.g. to go from SD to HD, to go from HD to 4K, to go from 4K to QHD, etc. It’s not just a case of changing the screen, the chips chosen just simply can’t do it. It’s why apps start to drop support for old TVs (because they can’t decode, say, h265 fast enough) and things like that.

Generally speaking you wouldn’t put a processor in a HD TV that was fast enough to decode 4K… it would be a waste of money and electricity. So you pick a processor that JUST ABOUT decodes all HD streams in real-time, and that will be a cheaper, less-powerful chip that doesn’t run as hot. Whereas your PC can do almost anything you throw at it, and just ramps up if it’s not going fast enough, hence the fan. The processor in your computer is probably worth more than some TVs are in their entirety.

Encoding and decoding are also two very different tasks. Decoding is basically following a series of instructions to recreate an image. There’s no “thinking” involved. But encoding is basically a puzzle to solve: What shortcuts can I take, what parts of the image are similar enough, where can I drop some information that the viewer won’t notice, in order to get this HUGE signal down into the specification of a HD file or broadcast, where at maximum I’m allowed only a certain number of bits per second to send the information. How can I formulate a puzzle that’s REALLY simple for the decoder, while giving them only the absolute minimum of information without sacrificing too much picture quality for THIS particular video? That’s a hard thing to do, making that puzzle, and requires enormous resources and very clever software. It’s why some videos are still horrible and blocky even though they are 4K – someone didn’t have the time, the processing power or the equipment to work out how to shrink that video even further without breaching the limit on bandwidth (which, if they did, the video wouldn’t be able to be broadcast or would be unnecessarily huge). Someone else, though, might have professional video encoding equipment, a very fast PC, better software, or just was able to leave it running longer and from the same source video they could make a smaller, higher-quality video stream of the exact same thing.

You are viewing 1 out of 44 answers, click here to view all answers.