high CPU usage

[999999999 0]

My CPU is i5-8259U, it has AES-NI. When I am on AirVPN and watching 4k videos, my CPU usage is around 70%, I thought AES-NI is supposed to handle the decryption and keep the CPU usage low. What can I do in order to keep my CPU usage low?

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

Not watch 4K, maybe. You're very likely trying to decode HEVC/H.265 which your CPU/graphics does not support, so it's done entirely in software. According to the product specification, it's only capable of decoding HD formats in hardware such as AVC/H.264. Newer hardware is required for HW decoding of HEVC or even AV1.

[cheapsheep 6]

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/encode-and-decode-capabilities-for-7th-generation-intel-core-processors-and-newer.html

You should be good to go. Which player are you using? Try MPC-BE.

[Stalinium 44]

Two separate things are happening:
1. OpenVPN traffic encryption. You can see in the logs which encryption method was chosen. It should be AES-256-*** (easy to find in OpenVPN GUI, idk about AirVPN's client). On top of that, I forgot whether OpenVPN had issues utilizing AES-NI on Windows.
Either way, 25-40 mbps for a low bitrate 4K stream are not enough to cause a high CPU load on all cores (OpenVPN is single-threaded).

2. 4K video decoding. This is demanding if you don't have hardware decoding or it doesn't work. It's multi-threaded and explains your 70% number. See other replies.

3. DRM. I would be surprised if you got official 4K streams without full hardware decoding support, since software-only DRM is considered "not safe enough" by copyright holders to give you the 4K viewing option. While it's possible for DRM to cause extra load, I don't think it's the case here.

[999999999 0]

Thank you everyone for the answers, looks like it is time to upgrade my CPU😀 This is a great and friendly forum👍