AMD Polaris (Radeon RX 4xx) H265 Encoding Samples

[easyfab]

I'm not really impressed by AMD Hardware encoding. Here an example for intel QS hardware AVC encoding ( on a little N3050 speed ~120fps). I can't test QS HEVC but it should be even better.

Source : https://forum.videohelp.com/attachments/31105-1428466828/SVT_1080p50.mkv

QS AVC VBR balanced 5mbit : see attached files

and some metrics:
AMD 1080p50 AVC 5mbit ( from post #117) : PSNR 28.308783 SSIM 7.235326
AMD 1080p50 HEVC 5mbit ( from post #117) : PSNR 29.310227 SSIM 8.083303
QS AVC VBR balanced 5mbit : PSNR 30.141544 SSIM 8.611983

If someone could provide QS HEVC or Nvidia NVENC AVC/HEVC, we could have an example for each hardware platform.

[Roph]

When it comes to AVC, 3rd gen GCN is actually superior than 4th as 4th gen dropped support for B-frames. But indeed, the quicksync 5mbit is better, especially in the second scene.

[chummy02]

NVENC Kepler 1st gen encoder, speed is 50fps with spatial-aq enabled at 1080p. Used 3 b-frames, spatial-aq and VBR 2-pass. Even being 4 years old it does better bitrate share across all video while VCE is spending too much bitrate at first scene and lack it at the later ones. Used FFmpeg for encoding. In general even NVENC AVC first gen give better results than Polaris AVC.

AMD is far behind NVIDIA if we look at Pascal vs Polaris and even in older gens they were always behind in encoding capabilities, hope they do a great advance for that question in Vega and improve quality and speed to compete with Pascal. Something which has no excuses is AMD doing hardware downgrade from VCE 3 to 3.4, what the problem with them. I suppose than in hardware industry you should never do downgrade for a new product but always upgrading it, they're innovating in this matter.

[easyfab]

@chummy02 Thanks for the file.

Yes real better than AMD.

For info the metrics of your file ( mesured with ffmpeg) : PSNR 29.342405 SSIM 8.205078

I reencode with QS to match your file size, for 27.8 MB I got : PSNR 29.819180 SSIM 8.363123
So Kepler 1st gen is as good as Intel Gen8 ( Braswell ) Pascal should be better.
On Intel Gen2 ( sandy bridge ) for 27.5 MB size I got : PSNR 29.213313 SSIM 7.744333 ( Better than AMD new encoder )

[Roph]

If you want some laughs, here's the clip done at 5mbit/s from first generation VCE, radeon 7000 series

[chummy02]

Another test but now without spatial-aq and VBR 1 pass. The quality dont change too much and performance goes from 50 to 70fps. The biggest quality change come from spatial-aq then vbr 2-pass improve less against.

Better to worse:
1.VBR2+spatial-aq
2.VBR1+spatial-aq
3.VBR2 no aq
4.VBR1 no aq

@roph do you tried with larger GOP in the 1st gen? I can see than all frames after the I-frame has better quality(VCE I-frames has lower quality than P-frames), AMD VCE has hard time with bitrate distribution apparently, I-frames always has lower quality than p-frames in high motion at least. That something i noticed well in my VCE 2.0 390.

[pc131]

NVENC Kepler 1st gen encoder, speed is 50fps with spatial-aq enabled at 1080p. Used 3 b-frames, spatial-aq and VBR 2-pass. Even being 4 years old it does better bitrate share across all video while VCE is spending too much bitrate at first scene and lack it at the later ones. Used FFmpeg for encoding. In general even NVENC AVC first gen give better results than Polaris AVC.

AMD is far behind NVIDIA if we look at Pascal vs Polaris and even in older gens they were always behind in encoding capabilities, hope they do a great advance for that question in Vega and improve quality and speed to compete with Pascal. Something which has no excuses is AMD doing hardware downgrade from VCE 3 to 3.4, what the problem with them. I suppose than in hardware industry you should never do downgrade for a new product but always upgrading it, they're innovating in this matter.

I have downloaded the attached file, tried to open it on my VAIO FW21E (Core 2 Duo T9600 2.8GHz, 4GB RAM, 3470 Ati mobile) and bluescreened my Windows10...

[KarMa]

Seems like AMD finally released it. https://twitter.com/AMD/status/821485770829656064

[ezcapper]

Does Polaris support lossless hevc via the new SDK like Nvidia does? Thanks

[greenmeister]

Hello. 7.0 beta4 version has got a bug. Several files not converted with HEVC. The program find the problem and stop. What is the problem. I tr, decode ffdshow and i try decode the LAV decoder. The problem tipically in fixed Qp option.

Oh. This version (beta4) doesn't include the QP option, max bitrate option, because the AMF 1.4 maximize 50000kbit/s, because the very very quick picture change stop the program. If up the qp rate (for example qp 18, up to qp 28) the program don't stop it.

[Micky]

Today was a new version from Hybrid released with support from AMD VCEEnc H.265

The result is much better as from A's Video Converter.

[Selur]

btw. rigaya also put VCEEnc on github: https://github.com/rigaya/VCEEnc/releases
-> and he usually reacts in a timely fashion to bug reports
(atm. cbr and vbr always produces 20Mbit output for HEVC)

[Roph]

How is the result supposed to be "much better" when it's coming from the same encoder? The programs are just alternate ways to ask the chip to do the same thing. I've tried it out and I don't see any improvement, only a worse UI.

[KarMa]

Does OBS have support for HEVC yet, as I keep updating it but it stays at H.264. Also with A's encoder I also don't HEVC support, even with the recent v7 update. On my RX460 with up to date drivers.

[Selur]

How is the result supposed to be "much better" when it's coming from the same encoder?

Different handling of the source (deinterlacing&filtering, vfr,..) would be the thing that comes to mind.

I agree since both tools use the same encoder at the end the only thing that should influence the output (assuming the same options are used during encoding) is the input send to the encoder.

Cu Selur

Ps.: about the 'worse UI': you are welcome

[Roph]

I see what you mean with the input. Using hardware downscaling with high quality looks great though.

[Micky]

In A's I must the GOP very high to get a quiet image to obtain without keyframe bumping (and does not always work)
Examples with source (in A's the GOP is "Auto") same settings...

Regards

[Roph]

Your hybrid example pumps too, just at longer intervals. A larger GOP is being used. This was established on page 1 of this thread months ago, use a larger GOP

Does OBS have support for HEVC yet, as I keep updating it but it stays at H.264. Also with A's encoder I also don't HEVC support, even with the recent v7 update. On my RX460 with up to date drivers.

The OBS VCE AMF plugin is about to add HEVC support. It should arrive with (or shortly after) OBS v18. Note that you cannot stream HEVC though (hitbox, twitch etc do not support it, no web browser natively decodes it), it's only useful for local recording.

VCE seems perfectly happy to do high-throughput simultaneous AVC and HEVC though, so I plan to stream at 720p30 AVC while capturing locally 1080p60 HEVC

For A's convertor you must select your GPU:



Then you can select AMD VCE H265 encoder from the dropdown:

[KarMa]

Yeah, the H.265 part is grayed out. I just uninstalled A's and installed the newest 7.0.1 with same result in the picture. I've had this problem during all of the A's 7 beta. I am also running 17.1.2 Radeon Drivers on Windows7, with a 2GB RX460.



Thanks for the OBS info.

[Roph]

Don't know then, maybe you need to upgrade to windows 10? A's uses microsoft's media foundation framework, which was updated for HEVC in windows 10. I don't know if you can use HEVC (even third party) through it in Windows 7?

[KarMa]

Don't know then, maybe you need to upgrade to windows 10? A's uses microsoft's media foundation framework, which was updated for HEVC in windows 10. I don't know if you can use HEVC (even third party) through it in Windows 7?

Well HEVC works in AMD Relive.

[Roph]

ReLive uses AMD's own AMF framework, not MFT like A's does.

The OBS plugin also uses AMF so you should be able to use HEVC through that too.

[KarMa]

Good to hear.

[KarMa]

With OBS 18.0 out and the AMF plugin being updated, HEVC works pretty well on my Win7 machine. No B-frame options which is concerning but maybe that will be added later. OBS is output constant frame rate with both H.264/HEVC which is nice over ReLive.

[Roph]

4xx VCE is lacking B-frame support in hardware, so very unlikely it would be added.

[KarMa]

4xx VCE is lacking B-frame support in hardware, so very unlikely it would be added.

With both H.264 and HEVC or just H.264? Cause I thought you were giving the impression that RX 4xx did support B-Frames for HEVC.

[Roph]

Earlier builds of A's convertor incorrectly presented B-frames as being available, but the setting does nothing. AMD VCE HW/SW guys have confirmed that polaris lacks B-frame support, for both H264 and 265.

[Roph]

So OBS doesn't support multiple framerates simultaneously, meaning I can't stream 720p30 while recording 1080p60.

So for now I stream 720p60 H264 (3.5mbit/s) and record 1080p60 HEVC (4mbit/s). With proper pre-analysis ("2-pass") and VBAQ, looks nice

[KarMa]

Just happened upon Staxrip supporting AMD VCE H.265 (along with VCE H.264), on my Win7 machine. Can toggle all the settings in GUI form like OBS. As well as supporting Nvidia H.265 and Intel H.265 encoders.

[Micky]

With the new AMD Crimson 17.7.2 GPU Acceleration not work - not in StaxRip and not in Hybrid (RX 460). Can anybody confirm this?

Thanks