RADV Vulkan Video Encoding Still Being Worked On

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RADV Vulkan Video Encoding Still Being Worked On

For Mesa 23.1 earlier this year initial RADV Vulkan Video decode support was merged for supporting GPU-based video acceleration with this Khronos video API. As we approach the end of the year, RADV's Vulkan Video encode support remains a work-in-progress but hopefully won't be too much longer before being upstreamed...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-Vulkan-Video-Encode-Dec

[RBilettess]

Good to hear that Vulkan Video Encode is progressing!
I'm not too happy with VA-API on AMD (quality with VBR is problematic and file size with QF is sometimes a problem).
Hopefully VVE will perform better in mentioned areas over time...

[aufkrawall]

I'm not too happy with VA-API on AMD (quality with VBR is problematic.

Are you sure that's related to VAAPI? On Windows with obs AMF plug-in, quality is still bad with RDNA3 AV1 vs. NVENC AV1.

[RBilettess]

Are you sure that's related to VAAPI? On Windows with obs AMF plug-in, quality is still bad with RDNA3 AV1 vs. NVENC AV1.

From my (FFMPEG-)experience, VA-API is fast, but lacks features. AMF has more features (e.g. vbaq) and produces better quality with an impact on speed, which is acceptable for me. NVENC has even better features (e.g spatial_aq), but is Nvidia only.

My hopes are, that VVE will be a feature rich, vendor agnostic standard that does not depend on limited hardware encoders. So hopefully everybody can enjoy high quality video encoding.
Most likely my hopes will not come true, but let's wait and see :-)

[Hibbelharry]

Are you sure that's related to VAAPI? On Windows with obs AMF plug-in, quality is still bad with RDNA3 AV1 vs. NVENC AV1.

I don't know if bad is the right term here since you can get quite decent results. I would agree that NVENC results seem to be a little better in terms of quality, but not that much if we only concern AV1 and H265. On H264 AMD still performs visibly worse and I guess that will never change since thats consistent across multiple GPU generations.

[Danny3]

Honestly I wish they would first finish the work on Vulkan Video decode, like implementing support for VP9 codec too!

[M.Bahr]

This is great news! Would be really nice to have a cross platform supported vendor agnostic api for video acceleration on modern gpus. This should give us a lot more possibilities for browser development at least on the desktop.

[M.Bahr]

Honestly I wish they would first finish the work on Vulkan Video decode, like implementing support for VP9 codec too!

Agreed! As far as i remember from the dev talk the reason why they prioritize h264 etc. is simply it's degree of distribution over other codecs. Open source codecs are definitely on their to do list.

[Muddy]

I wish they had it already, had to return my AMD card for *vidia one so I could do my encoding work. AV1 is where they should be focused, bring in legacy h264/h265 tech later.

[hauberg]

Is this lack of encoding support why battery life tends to be poor on my amd laptop when using zoom / teams?