Better AMD Radeon VCE Video Encode Performance Coming To Linux

[tildearrow]

In the meantime, UVD decoding GPU crashes are back in Mesa main branch

Thank you for reporting. I'll stay on Mesa 19.0.

[tildearrow]

I would like AMD to start taking video encoding seriously, at this point compared to the competition (NVidia) its really embarrassing and it is yet another reason on the bucket list of why NVidia is ahead of AMD in a lot of more professional areas.

Sadly I agree. NVIDIA had 4:4:4 encoding since Maxwell... Intel had it since Ice Lake...
On the other hand, AMD refuses to add 4:4:4 encoding to any of their cards, and the only time they did... the feature got completely unused because it only supported I-Frames (so your video would end up being gigantic as every frame is like a compressed image due to lack of P-Frames which are just the difference/motion between frames)...

Also, cue my rant from the day VCN 3.0 was announced with absolutely no changes whatsoever.

[mdedetrich]

i would say in general nvidia is prefered, which is reason why unless you are using Linux primarly Nvidia at equal price and equal performance is almost always prefered. Better computing stack, better raytracing, better DLSS, better hardware encoding (in both quality and speed at the same time) and on windows (that is where it matters) better drivers sort of?

Intel understands it, and develops better QuickSync (worse in quality but even more rich in terms of decoding/encoding chromas/profiles), XeSS is also comming, and also OneAPI is also potentially move in right direction.

Well historically speaking NVidia also had much better drivers for Linux, in fact they were the only company that took Linux seriously when it came to delivering quality drivers (its just that they were proprietary). Its only very recently (talking ~2 years) that AMD has delivered decent open source drivers. Intel has a good track record of open drivers however their job was simpler since people only used iGPU's for compositing/desktop (which is a lot simpler) and not for any real gaming/professional use (again up until recently with things like Quicksync).

[shanedav4]

I would like AMD to start taking video encoding seriously, at this point compared to the competition (NVidia) its really embarrassing and it is yet another reason on the bucket list of why NVidia is ahead of AMD in a lot of more professional areas.

I hope they also make it easier to set up. AMD video encoding has always been a nightmare to get configured, where Nvidia all you need to do is install the right packages and it just works. On Linux AMD has been gaming only unless you like pulling your hair out getting the encoding working. I hope they are going to do more than a half a#sed attempt.

[theriddick]

NVIDIA drivers have a big advantage when it comes to Wine/Proton gaming because their Linux drivers are based off their windows binary drivers unlike AMD.

If AMD EVER adopts a open-source driver solution for windows; then it will be great news for Linux as developers will code/test against that thus helping Wine/Proton stuff under Linux for AMD.

At least that is what I think/hope; but I'm probably wrong.

[sophisticles]

I would like AMD to start taking video encoding seriously, at this point compared to the competition (NVidia) its really embarrassing and it is yet another reason on the bucket list of why NVidia is ahead of AMD in a lot of more professional areas.

It is not in AMD's interest to take hardware encoding seriously. AMD has spent years promoting the notion of "more cores" and one of the few things that benefit from the number of cores/threads AMD offers in the high end is video encoding.

Now imagine if AMD were to release a cheap APU with a great hardware encoder, that would cannibalize AMD's high end sales.

Intel has more motivation because they don't have as many cores at the high end nor do they have the same power consumption.

NVIDIA, since they don't make any CPU's has even more motivation to take market share by developing good hardware encoders.

[mdedetrich]

It is not in AMD's interest to take hardware encoding seriously. AMD has spent years promoting the notion of "more cores" and one of the few things that benefit from the number of cores/threads AMD offers in the high end is video encoding.

Now imagine if AMD were to release a cheap APU with a great hardware encoder, that would cannibalize AMD's high end sales.

Intel has more motivation because they don't have as many cores at the high end nor do they have the same power consumption.

NVIDIA, since they don't make any CPU's has even more motivation to take market share by developing good hardware encoders.

I think you are over exaggerating the cannibalisation here, while its true you can just brute force encoding with lots of CPU cores its an extremely cost inefficient way to do so and in reality its an extremely minor reason to use AMD CPU's. Realistically AMD is not gaining any real sales by encouraging people to buy their CPU's for video encoding.

The matter of fact is if you do video encoding on any serious level you buy an NVidia GPU since it has dedicated hardware silicon to perform this encoding, x86 processors do not.

This also applies in the server/enterprise, EPYC servers are useful for webservers where you are handling a lot of standard business logic but if you are doing any kind of encoding you don't use AMD CPU's for this.

Ultimately I think the real reason why AMD's hardware encoding on GPU's is subpar is simply because it wasn't a financial priority (remember we are talking about a company that almost went bankrupt ~7 years ago here). At that time video encoding was a pretty niche thing and AMD GPU had very little penetration in enterprise, it was pretty much all focused on budget value gamers.

If I was them in that situation I also wouldn't focus on video encoding, instead I would get the basic product right. Now its different though, and they really should hire someone thats dedicated to video encoding if they haven't already done so.

[Go_Vulkan]

If we're talking about serious video encoding, you will get a 16 core / 32 threads AMD Ryzen 5950X or (even better) Threadripper. GPU Hardware encoders suck quality-wise. Encoding is a one-time job, whereas the result will be delivered to millions of users.

[mdedetrich]

If we're talking about serious video encoding, you will get a 16 core / 32 threads AMD Ryzen 5950X or (even better) Threadripper. GPU Hardware encoders suck quality-wise. Encoding is a one-time job, whereas the result will be delivered to millions of users.

That is not the only use case i.e. you are conveniently ignoring streaming, i.e. the specific personal one I had to deal with was encoding real time security footage. In that case, NVidia GPU's was the way to go (at least if you didn't want to break the bank).

[Go_Vulkan]

It is no wonder that OBS studio adds realtime AV-encoding via CPU (SVT-AV1, https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...io-27.2-Beta-1), because this is the way to go. By the way, if everybody would be streaming, nobody could watch anymore, right? How many people are actually doing this?