[gandharva]

There doesn't seem to be much difference between 4th gen and 5th gen, not worth an upgrade for existing owners probably.

If you aim for HEVC/H.265 there is a big difference:

Broadwell’s video decode capabilities will also be increasing compared to Haswell. On top of Intel’s existing codec support, Broadwell will be implementing a hybrid H.265 decoder, allowing Broadwell to decode the next-generation video codec in hardware, but not with the same degree of power efficiency as H.264 today. In this hybrid setup Intel will be utilizing both portions of their fixed function video decoder and executing decoding steps on their shaders in order to offer complete H.265 decoding. The use of the shaders for part of the decoding process is less power efficient than doing everything in fixed function hardware but it’s better than the even less optimal CPU.

The use of a hybrid approach is essentially a stop-gap solution to the problem – the lead time on the finalization of H.265 would leave little time to develop a fixed function encoder for anyone with a long product cycle like Intel – and we expect that future generation products will have a full fixed function decoder. In the meantime Intel will be in the company of other GPU manufacturers such as NVIDIA, who is using a similar hybrid approach for H.265 on their Maxwell architecture.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8355/intel...re-preview