FIG. 3 is a diagram depicting an example scenario of a series of frames including instantaneous changes that are encoded by a conventional encoder. When it is described herein that a frame is being used as a reference frame, it should be understood that the frame is a reconstructed version of the received input frame. Typically, during encoding, a reconstructed version of a frame is a lossily-encoded version of the frame. A frame used as a reference frame is a reconstructed version of the frame so that the reference data used in the encoding process mimics the decoding process. Thus, when referring to a frame being used as a reference frame, the terms frame, reference frame, and a reconstructed version of a frame can be used interchangeably. As described above, a conventional encoder uses a reconstructed version of an immediately prior frame as the reference frame for frame 310. Then, the conventional encoder uses frame 310 as the reference frame for frame 320. In frame 320, an instantaneous change occurs in region 301. This instantaneous change, for example, could be due to an inventory window being opened in a video game. This results in compression efficiency challenges since reference frame 310 is very different in this region.

Then the conventional encoder continues to encode frames including frames 330 and 340, again, using immediately prior frames as respective reference frames. In this example, because frames 330 and 340 include the same information in region 301 as in frame 320, the conventional encoder using the immediately prior frame as a reference does not present a compression challenge.