A's Video Converter 7.0.0 - now supports VCE HEVC encoding on RX 4xx

[mariush]

Not sure if it's the right spot to post this, but thought it may be worth it:

A's Video Encoder 7.0.0 beta : http://bluesky23.yukishigure.com/en/AsVideoConv.html

Published on the 18th of December, minor update on the 22nd.

Could be a good tool for test hardware hevc encoding with the RX cards.


Features
This program is a video converter using AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and Microsoft Encoder, and it has the following features.

Hardware H.264 encode using AMD VCE (Video Codec Engine)
Hardware H.264 and H.265/HEVC encode using Intel QSV (Quick Sync Video)*1
Hardware H.264 and H.265/HEVC encode using NVIDIA NVENC*2
Software H.264 and H.265/HEVC encode*1
Hardware decode
Hardware filtering*3
Up to 8 files transcoding at the same time
Simply movie editor
Batch transcoding and Combine transcoding
Automatic transcoding using folder watching


Changes
Version 7.0.0 Beta2 (12/22/2016)

Fixed application error under specific conditions when using AMD VCE H.265 Encoder
Fixed not running hardware decode under specific settings
Minor changes and fixes

Version 7.0.0 Beta (12/18/2016)

Added support for VCE H.265/HEVC encoding with AMD Radeon RX 480/470/460 GPU (Required Crimson ReLive Edition)
Added support to select GPU for hardware encoder
Fixed green line issue when playing file created by AMD VCE H.264 Encoder and external muxer
Resolved interlace encoding problem with AMD VCE H.264 Encoder and internal muxer
Fixed slow playback issue when playing interlaced video file created by VCE or QSV encoder and MP4Box
Resolved problem when playing video file created by Microsoft H.265 Encoder with specific decoder
Added support for Dolby AC3, ALAC and FLAC encoding
Added support for AAC, ALAC, FLAC and Opus encoding using external encoder
Added support for multi audio stream
Added support for 5.1ch audio
Added support for MKV output using MKVToolNix
Added "Use time codes" option for external muxer
Added "Include sub folder" and "Start on startup" option for folder watch
Fixed issue when using Avisynth filter
Many changes and fixes

[NikosD]

Well, I tried latest 7.0.0 beta2 with a Polaris RX 470 card.

One mode of H.265 is not working at least for me. It was crashing all the time.

The VCE H.265 Peak VBR works ok and I tried a 1080p H.264 -> 1080p H.265.

It reached ~100fps with a good quality at the default settings of average ~6Mbps bitrate.

The speed doesn't change a lot if I use CPU for decoding or HW decoding, the CPU utilisation of course goes to minimum with HW decoding.

I tried also VCE H.264 encoding using the same sample with the same Peak VBR settings for H.264 and the result was a disaster.

At an average ~6Mbps like HEVC, the AVC encoding had a huge like pulse effect (artifact) and awful image quality.

I tried VCEEnc v2.0 by rigaya with StaxRip x64 GUI which supports H.264 encoding only, with similar settings for H.264 like A's converter and it didn't have that pulse and the image quality was a lot better.

But compared to A's HEVC encoding, VCEEnc's AVC encoding was clearly inferior.

All the 1080p conversions, H.264 to H.265 and H.264 to H.264 using A's converter or VCEEnc with or without HW decoding never exceeded 100fps (~103 fps at the most)
VCEEnc using CPU decoding (Core i5-2400) dropped performance to 80fps

The big differences were in picture quality (A's HEVC > VCEEnc AVC > A's AVC), in CPU utilisation and GPU core frequency (in some modes like using HW decoding the GPU core dropped from 1300MHz to 751MHz or even less and it wasn't stable)

I have sent more than 2 emails to rigaya asking for a new VCEEnc version supporting HEVC encoding, but he hasn't replied yet.

[jones1913]

@NikosD

see here: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Libraries...ment-269232387

Rigaya is probably waiting for hevc support to materialize in AMF-SDK, before he updates vceenc.

[mariush]

Well my card finally arrived today, it's an XFX RX 470 4GB with single fan. With the latest drivers from AMD's website, I'm not able to select VCE HEVC encoder from the application at all (tried both 32bit and 64bit versions of the app.).

The h264 encoder worked fine, with lavc filters (0.69) for hardware decoding, it converted a 720p h264 video from h264 to h264 at 128fps (with good quality setting, deviated from the default setting). It did work fully in hardware, as the cpu usage didn't go above 3% or thereabouts throughout the encoding.

I guess lack of HEVC could be because I'm running Windows 7 64bit, though it's not clear from the notes on the developer's page.

[NikosD]

It seems there are a lot of discussions around a few issues regarding VCE of Polaris cards:

1) B-Frame support (for H.264 & H.265)
2) HEVC support in general and 4K60fps specifically
3) Polaris VCE 3.4 speed
4) Polaris VCE 3.4 quality
5) 2 pass encoding


1) About the first one, unfortunately according to this AMD guy we can officially say that AMD had a HW regression and at the latest VCE 3.4 of Polaris cards doesn’t support B-frames in HW for H.264

Previous generations (VCE 3.0 and even VCE 2.0) had support of B-Frames for H.264, although I don’t know about the quality of the support and the H.264 encoding in general.

https://github.com/GPUOpen-Libraries...s/AMF/issues/8

Regarding HEVC B-frame support of Polaris, I’m not sure.


2) There is definitely HEVC support already for Polaris cards within Crimson Relive driver using Relive tool and A’s Video Converter v7.0.0 (beta) which according to the link below is based on MFT and not AMF although they do have the same code base:

https://github.com/GPUOpen-Libraries...ment-268067292

AMF v1.4 is expected to release ASAP when they fix a last minute bug, introduced to latest Crimson Relive drivers, in order to provide C++ AMF HEVC encoder API to everyone.

Now, regarding 4K60 fps doesn’t look feasible, although it was definitely advertised in AMD’s slides.
I tried with Relive and it failed, I’ll try again with A’s Video Converter this time.

But using Relive I definitely could record 4K60fps using AVC and Polaris RX 470.


3) Polaris VCE 3.4 speed looks like a HW regression too for H.264 HW encoding.

According to the developer of a OBS plugin who has tried every VCE version, VCE 3.4 is definitely slower than VCE 3.0 in HW H.264 encoding (VCE 3.0 doesn’t support H.265 encoding).

Take a look at some figures here:
VCE 3.0
https://github.com/Xaymar/obs-studio...ardware-VCE3.0

VCE 3.4
https://github.com/Xaymar/obs-studio...ardware-VCE3.4


4) Haven’t tried any previous generations of VCE for H.264 HW encoding, but using VCEEnc v2.0 with VCE 3.4 of Polaris cards doesn’t look bad.

But A’s H.265 encoding is a lot better, so I’m looking forward to a proper support of HEVC from AMD in latest AMF in order to see the real potential of HEVC encoding and quality of Polaris cards.

5) 2-pass encoding for both H.264 & H.265 has been advertised for Polaris cards in various AMD slides, let’s hope that someday we can try it.

[NikosD]

Using this VCE Benchmark tool https://github.com/Xaymar/obs-studio..._2016-11-16.7z I confirmed what I found out using A's converter and VCEEnc.

The tool is for H.264 only and I get 102.8 fps for "balanced" setting and 1920 x 1080.
At 3840 x 2160 and "balanced" setting my VCE 3.4 (Polaris) achieves 26.5 fps.

I don't know how the Relive tool achieves 4K60fps using H.264.

Maybe I have to try it again, just to be sure.

Probably uses "speed" setting and "No Cabac" or other performance settings.

Using A's converter for H.265 I had exactly the same speed results like H.264, actually just a few fps less.

So, Polaris VCE looks like a 4K30fps encoder for both H.264 and H.265 with the default settings of A's converter.

[mariush]

The default renderer (DX11) wouldn't work on my computer with Windows 7, all tests failed.

So I changed the rendered to DX9 and DX9Ex and here's some results ( speed, balanced, quality)

DX9

1280x 720 : 293.6 , 223.8 , 130.4
1920x1080 : 137.3 , 103.0 ,  58.7
3840x2160 :  33.2 ,  20.8 ,  15.9

DX9Ex Run 1

1280x 720 : 267.6 , 210.7 , 126.5
1920x1080 : 120.0 ,  95.3 ,  56.5
3840x2160 :  31.1 ,  24.1 ,  17.3

DX9Ex Run 2

1280x 720 : 275.9 , 217.3 , 127.5
1920x1080 : 125.9 ,  99.2 ,  56.5
3840x2160 :  31.0 ,  24.2 ,  16.9

FX-8320 based system with XFX RX 470 4GB GDDR5 @ 1750Mhz (6600Mhz) memory speed

[Roph]

Originally Posted by NikosD

At an average ~6Mbps like HEVC, the AVC encoding had a huge like pulse effect (artifact) and awful image quality.

Increase the GOP to avoid this, I use 150-300 when encoding H264 using A's convertor. By default for H264 it seems to use a tiny GOP which results in much keyframe pumping and also a waste of bits on said keyframes. The same can be said for HEVC from A's.

I find that by default with the built-in MP4 muxer, A's produces files with seeking issues when encoding HEVC from Polaris. This is fixable by choosing MKV and supplying the path to mkvmerge.exe