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AMD Polaris HEVC Encode/Decode, is this 'really' good for Streamers?

Coming from a 290 to the 970 i personally found the Image quality to be poor on Nvidia's NVENC x264 encoder compared with AMD's VCE encoder, there is also a slight performance hit with Nvidia and 0 with AMD, Byte rate on AMD's encoder is also much higher, upto 40 or 50 MBytes/s where as Nvidia its 130 MBits/s
I kid you not i'm doing a lot of recording of late and have got a bit tired of the washed-out blurry quality of Nvidia NVENC.

I actually turned on my Intel iGPU, switched off Shadowplay and am now using Quick Sync through MSI After Burner, even that is better than NVENC.

Shadowlay is very convenient, but actually so is MSI AB if you're just recording, its also compatible with AMD's VCE.

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AMDs Media SDK is quite old in terms of software - the SDK doesn't even support the YUV444 format that is one of the main selling points for VCE 3.0. h265/HEVC is also missing.

Thats for recording & streaming logically.....
 
FTFY

humbug said:
Bit rate on AMD's encoder is also much lower, upto 50 MBits/s where as Nvidia its upto 130 MBits/s
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Afterburner is rubbish for recording in comparison to OBS, Plays.tv. No commercial video editor Very few commercial video editors support MKV so you'll probably have to remux it if you want to import it. AVI is also an out of date container and h.264 wasn't meant to be placed inside it.

The quality of all hardware encoders can be good or bad depending on the bitrate and settings you choose. When configured correctly they can all produce great footage. Shadowplay specifically (NOT NVENC in general) does make some odd choices regarding how the video is encoded though.

Lastly neither twitch or youtube support HEVC so HEVC streaming doesn't exist and won't until it's supported by the services. They shouldn't really be advertising it.

It's like "look at all these cool things our cards can do, we haven't updated our sdk yet so it they can't yet but still, LOOK!"

Both AMD and NVIDIA have dropped the ball in terms of supporting HEVC game recording although NVIDIA has been much better in terms of enabling third-party applications to encode video using HEVC.
 
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Hotwired said:
So which one of you is right.

Humbug is saying 50 MBytes while Trevonn says the same number but writes it as MBits
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50 MB/s per second is the same as 400 Mb/s no hardware encoder can do that. That's an insane bit rate no one would actually use.

hykf4mX.jpg GfP5wGr.jpg

Photo evidence from afterburner. Notice it's a b not a B
 
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humbug said:
why does Shadowplay never encode more than around 25 no matter what settings i use.
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If you're talking about using nvenc in MSI afterburner then it's probably due to bad implementation. Try obs-studio and make sure you're using CBR if you want a constant 50Mbps etc. If it's shadowplay in geforce experience then that's definitely a bug. Even my 960 could do 50Mb+
 
MyBrains said:
I do keep hearing about VP9 though, so i guess we have to wait and see which comes out on top.
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h.265 is mostly on top, save that Google keep picking VP9 back up off the carpet and trying to force it back up there. Google own some patents on it and have been trying to make VP9 the standard for ages. Hence things like it being pushed on YouTube, which they own.

But h.265 is significantly better technically.
 
@humbug.. so with YT, Twitch not supporting HEVC yet, and seems like its gona be a while before they do.. Raja just used this as a selling point when he said 'streaming at 4K with no perf loss', blah blah.

I use OBS Studio and have noticed that streaming on my 6700K with 3600kbps has pretty much no perf loss tho i feel it a bit more in the CPU intensive Arma 3. But with Studio you can use different bitrates while streaming and recording. I use the 3600kbps (720p) for streaming and 12288kbps (720p) for recording (using Intel Quick Sync) on my 6700K and dont really see much of a hit on the CPU.

I was really hoping to totally free up my CPU with this whole HEVC etc stuff.. seems like its gona be a long wait. Glad i got the 6700K now, at least its a beast in the streaming/recording department :)

Btw the Quick Sync quality isnt that bad when you up the bitrate, i'll obviously test the new AMD VCE from the guy on Reddit when the OBS devs decide to put it into Studio themselves, i dont wana mess around unpacking 3rd party files into my Studio install :)
 
AMD_Robert post a comment yesterday on reddit:

''Starting with RX 400 Series we added HEVC encode support. We are still working on the SDK that will enable this functionality in 3rd-party tools.''

.......................................
 
MyBrains said:
I've started using the new H.264 AMD Advanced Encoder since it was implemented into Studio, one word.. Insane! :D

No perf loss while recording, the built-in presets are a great idea too, some may need a tweak or two but they're getting there, i've stopped using Quick Sync now :)
Click to expand...

Yeah, its fast becoming my go to program for recording DX12
Action is still my favorite for its complete package though.
 
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