Steam Beta Adds VA-API Acceleration For Remote Play

[brucethemoose]

What is the use case for accelerated encoding?

In addition to what yump said, theoretically, it facilitates the use of better video codecs in the future.


h264 (which is what Steam uses now AFAIK) is pretty easy to run on the CPU. HEVC is a harder. AV1 is *very* hard.

Newer codecs would give you better quality at the same bitrate, as well as some other useful features (like bit depths higher than 8 bits, HDR support, maybe some codec native features like grain generation, better scaling, smarter bitrate control and so on).

[doomie]

(Hopefully in time though we'll see Vulkan Video take over for video encode/decode in a cross-platform friendly manner.)

*hopes hardr*

[Vistaus]

Simon at Collabora did tell me that was on the way... 20 months ago.

I wonder what will arrive sooner: Steam 64-bit or GTK3 GIMP (stable)?

[dragon321]

Simon at Collabora did tell me that was on the way... 20 months ago.

20 months is not that bad. GitHub issue for that is open since 2014. Guess we have to wait little longer.

[markg85]

I just tried this out. AMD RX 580 GPU (old one by now but still adequate if you don't use 4k) on the game pc.
Low end AMD embedded vega on a laptop.

While the steam magic remote play works like magic, it does look.... Quite blocky/compressed with hardware encoding.
Now this was with the game Ori which has lots and lots of subtle effects moving around. For this game the hardware encoding was not playable in my option. But i'm sure this is a lot more playable in a shooter!

What i was much more impressed by was the software encoding! After flipping that "on" (aka, disabling hardware encoding) i was welcomed with quite nice graphics in Ori and played it for a few hours

In my specific case software encoding was the way to go. This doesn't mean the hardware encoding is bad. There are so many settings to tweak to make that a much better experience. I'm sure Valve will improve it (a lot) to get on par with software encoding.

[sheepdestroyer]

20 months is not that bad. GitHub issue for that is open since 2014. Guess we have to wait little longer.

2014->2012 : https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ste...nux/issues/179

[Fidelix]

This doesn't mean the hardware encoding is bad. There are so many settings to tweak to make that a much better experience. I'm sure Valve will improve it (a lot) to get on par with software encoding.

Not really. It will never improve. That's just the reality with the AMD hardware encoder.
The hardware encoder that AMD cards use is the worst in the industry. On Nvidia cards the stream looks just as good as software encoding, and there is lower latency.

[tuxd3v]

I saw in https://wiki.libav.org/Hardware/vaapi
That there are not yet support for MPEG4, VP9 decode via libva2 for AMD { Southern Islands | Sea Islands |Volcanic Islands },
don't know if the problem is in libva2 or in mesa..
an example of vainfo on amd kavery:

$ vainfo
libva info: VA-API version 1.10.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_10
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.10 (libva 2.10.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 20.3.5 for AMD KAVERI (DRM 2.50.0, 5.10.0-8-amd64, LLVM 11.0.1)
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
VAProfileMPEG2Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileMPEG2Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Advanced : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileH264Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264Main : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileNone : VAEntrypointVideoProc

[dragon321]

2014->2012 : https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ste...nux/issues/179

I was referring to another issue, thank you for correction.