Testing Jetson Orin Hardware JPEG Encoder Block

The Jetson Orin AGX has two Hardware JPEG Encoder blocks which in theory will allow you to encode images to JPEG much faster than using the CPU alone – as usual the reality is a little more complicated than the data-sheet might suggest!

The aim was to test and time the encoding of 24Bit RGB images in host memory to JPEG then back to host memory and compare the results with libjpeg-turbo.

For images up to about 1080p there is no real difference in encoding times, for larger images of 5328×3040 the hardware encoders were about 30% faster, which isn’t an earth shaking speedup, but it also reduces CPU load by about 50% which may be advantageous if your code is already CPU bound!  This also demonstrates how very fast libjpeg-turbo is!

For more details and the test code see jetson_orin_hardware_jpeg_test