Awful AMD VCE performance

[Bacon1]

Have you tried the game dvr built into windows 10?

Also this video has a neat comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpsL6UYuRWQ&feature=youtu.be

 

[el etro]

Is VCE related. Tomorrow i will do a comparison between by driver, the last one and 16.3 to get appropriate results(video gets done mon/tue). BTW Plays.TV seems to be the best performing recording program on the Radeons.

 

[Shivansps]

Is VCE related. Tomorrow i will do a comparison between by driver, the last one and 16.3 to get appropriate results(video gets done mon/tue). BTW Plays.TV seems to be the best performing recording program on the Radeons.

It is, but VBR recording is kind of broken at this point, at least for VCE Polaris, you may get some good results and you may get some awfull results for example, you set the target bitrate to 40mbps, on some videos, specially long ones, bitrate may drop to 10mbps for some reason, and quality suffers because of it, hell you can visually see the bitrate going up and down on some videos.

As for VCE, it seems worse than i trought, VCE on Polaris is a regresion for H264 recording, VCE on Polaris is exactly at VCE 1.0 levels for H264, hell it cant even handle 1080p@60fps with quality profile.

22:39:02.043: ==== Recording Start ===============================================
22:39:02.043: [ffmpeg muxer: 'adv_file_output'] Writing file 'F:/Videos/2016-11-03 22-39-01.mkv'...
22:39:02.143: [AMF Encoder] <AMFEncoder::VCE::GetOutput> Resized Packet Buffer to 131072.
22:39:06.300: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (5/5/90)
22:39:07.734: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (10/5/90)
22:39:09.050: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (15/5/90)
22:39:10.533: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (20/5/90)
22:39:12.022: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (25/5/90)
22:39:13.083: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (30/5/90)
22:39:14.567: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (35/5/90)
22:39:15.984: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (40/5/90)
22:39:17.324: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (45/5/90)
22:39:18.583: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (50/5/90)
22:39:20.133: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (55/5/90)
22:39:21.633: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (60/5/90)
22:39:23.033: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (65/5/90)
22:39:24.413: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (70/5/90)
22:39:25.696: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (75/5/90)
22:39:27.534: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (80/5/90)
22:39:29.136: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is growing. (85/5/90)
22:39:30.783: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:31.173: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:31.368: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:31.701: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:31.944: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:32.212: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:32.412: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:32.750: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:33.069: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:33.308: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:33.486: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:33.946: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:34.183: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:34.469: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:34.733: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:34.967: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:35.320: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:35.407: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:35.487: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:35.534: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:36.202: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:36.563: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:36.883: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:37.085: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:37.492: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:37.568: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:37.966: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:38.139: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:38.583: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:38.783: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:39:39.051: [AMF Encoder] <Plugin::AMD::VCEEncoder::SendInput> Input Queue is full, dropping frame...
22:42:42.796: Last log entry repeated for 683 more lines

For 1080p@60fps i need to set it at "speed" profile quality, and even as that it may lag.

This is probably why AMD never documented features of VCE block on Polaris... Polaris VCE is 1.0 with HEVC support (not yet implemented in driver)

 

[Shivansps]

I just tested gameDVR, works OK, quality is good, but random shutter may happen every now and them, probably when the encoder drops a frame. Its better than anything else, that for sure.

 

[chummy]

Win10 DVR has better frame capture than OBS(far less overhead) because apparently it's using similar method to NVFBC, it feed frame to the encoder directly from GPU buffer while OBS send GPU rendered frames to system RAM first then it come back to GPU VCE encoder what cause higher latency. At end encoder can skip some frames because they dont arrived at the time.

Since you have a 4 thread CPU which already should be full loaded to render the Witcher 3 game it can be getting even higher latency delay in frame transfer from GPU>RAM>GPU. I tested Win10DVR with Witcher 3 and it will not cause duplicated frames encoding like OBS do for my VCE2 too. Only problem than Win10 has internal VBR fixed at something like 40Mbit/s and always record at that bitrate here in high motion, but quality looks better than AMF. Give a try to see if it's working properly with your encoder version.

The downside of Win10DVR is than it only works properly in game with Borderless mode, fullscreen will cause some glitches like framerate becoming variable instead of constant, so be sure to run the game at borderless.

 

[Shivansps]

GameDVR works fine, not perfect, but it is fine, the bit i dont understand is why it records using profile level 4.1 for 60 fps, it should be 4.2 at least. It also seems to be using main profile and "speed" quality, thats good because VCE on Polaris has a hard time trying to archive more under H264, no idea why AMD decided to return to VCE 1.0 level for H264...

As for variable framerate, i dont think it can be done in any other way, if the encoder gets the frame from the gpu directly, it does not means the framerate cant be constant? Shadowplay also uses variable framerate for the same reason i think.

 

[chummy]

Shadowplay use some hard coded CFR to make a constant framerate video output, i dont know exactly what they do, but they make the video to become CFR even if mediainfo read it like VFR. The way of capturing the frames make no difference how it will be encoded at framerate. Win10DVR is doing something like this too, but when you run game at fullscreen the framerate becomes broken sometimes and you can check framerate consistency running it on MPC-HC displaying OSD to check jittering and FPS playback.

DVR Borderless running like a perfect CFR: http://i.imgur.com/QbOEPrP.png
DVR Fullscreen jittering looking same as VFR: http://i.imgur.com/5ZoTZUT.png
DVR Fullscreen frame drops: http://i.imgur.com/oZ1sWE3.png

Microsoft has all their win10/DX12 things designed around Borderless so that recorder is someway designed for running at borderless too.

 

[Shivansps]

You right, GameDVR works perfectly under borderless, thanks you, after triyng lots of progrms the best option was to use the built-in feature of Windows 10, this is just silly.

Quality is not excellent because it seems to use "speed" profile quality, but is still VERY VERY good, this also seems to work because GameDVR is using Media Foundation, from what i heard, MediaSDK broke everything.

Finally i have something i can work with, GameDVR does not support streaming right?

 

[el etro]

Just got all tests done, and that quality problem was for one game only(in my case Crysis 3). Will upload the video this night to everyone get to conclusions, i'm trying to save most of the quality of the capture.

It is, but VBR recording is kind of broken at this point, at least for VCE Polaris, you may get some good results and you may get some awfull results for example, you set the target bitrate to 40mbps, on some videos, specially long ones, bitrate may drop to 10mbps for some reason, and quality suffers because of it, hell you can visually see the bitrate going up and down on some videos.

Even at lowest setting quality is good, but plays.tv is not working in some games. Looks like to be a problem with the OP rig. VBR is standard, but did not affected my quality except in Crysis 3. Didn't got rid of the blackbars, had not much time to search of it, but it was got form different rez(1440x900, 1920x1080/1920x1200 both on VCE).

Card used: Radeon 7950.

Video will be here: https://youtu.be/S0XJEiTxqe4

 

[Shivansps]

Its very simple to test, in a complex 1st person game, like Crysis or Witcher 3, if you set bitrate in Plays.TV to something like 35mbps, it cant drop all the way down to 10mbps as averange, on a very long video (like an hour). Then if it looks good or not it will depend of the game and the person watching it.

Althought, it may be a bug with Polaris VCE only.

 

[el etro]

Its very simple to test, in a complex 1st person game, like Crysis or Witcher 3, if you set bitrate in Plays.TV to something like 35mbps, it cant drop all the way down to 10mbps as averange, on a very long video (like an hour). Then if it looks good or not it will depend of the game and the person watching it.

Althought, it may be a bug with Polaris VCE only.

If is this then nothing can be done. Any setting i put on the Recorder set the Bitrate below the set range. Metro LL is heavy but less intense, the bit rate maintains not so below the set data rate, may be this the problem. I don't think is a hardware issue, really.


Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0XJEiTxqe4

----------------------------------------


Will try OBS with the plugin later, maybe WED/FRI the video is out.










----------------------------------


Edit: Video is fixed.

 

[Bacon1]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5bp3vb/hey_ramd_i_need_your_help_tracking_down_a_bug/

The author of the plugin is looking into some bugs with it, might be related or at least you should talk with him about the issues you are having.

 

[el etro]

Did a fresh Windows install, used driver 16.11.4 and updated PlaysTV. Recording quality is great now, but with some ugly stucks, will upload a video this week, with the result.

As i found the cause of this problem i will share the update here.

 

[el etro]

Forelast part of the work is online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhewaQUR6dc&feature=youtu.be
Capture quality is huge, sadly youtube couldn't show it even at 1080p.


Final part will be to make VSR and VCE work welll together.

 

[chummy]

I seeing Xaymar added some benchmarks for H264 VCE generation and i need to laugh. VCE 3.4(2016) has slower performance than NVENC 1.0 from 2012 and even lower quality. The worse is than VCE 3.4 is slower than VCE 3.0, AMD doing downgrade over generations, this is the first time some brand decided to downgrade their encoder. I wait Intel and NVIDIA dont get lazy like AMD and follow that practice.

 

[Bacon1]

I seeing Xaymar added some benchmarks for H264 VCE generation and i need to laugh. VCE 3.4(2016) has slower performance than NVENC 1.0 from 2012 and even lower quality. The worse is than VCE 3.4 is slower than VCE 3.0, AMD doing downgrade over generations, this is the first time some brand decided to downgrade their encoder. I wait Intel and NVIDIA dont get lazy like AMD and follow that practice.

Source for the benchmarks?

 

[chummy]

Source for the benchmarks?

In their VCE plugin repository has Wiki for each VCE generation and now has performance benchmark for every resolution and quality presets.The amount of performance loss from VCE 3.4 compared to 3.0 is like 50%. I dont know what the problem with AMD for doing this.. I just hope it's driver broken and be improved a lot when/if they fix it. If it's hardware downgrade just hope they release new VCE 4.0 with imporvements for Vega instead of adding this crap to it. Vega will not worth with a encoder which can only do 1440p@30fps at "AMD quality mode" which already is worse quality than Intel/NVIDIA.

https://github.com/Xaymar/obs-studio_amf-encoder-plugin/wiki/Hardware-VCE3.0
https://github.com/Xaymar/obs-studio_amf-encoder-plugin/wiki/Hardware-VCE3.4

 

[Bacon1]

In their VCE plugin repository has Wiki for each VCE generation and now has performance benchmark for every resolution and quality presets.The amount of performance loss from VCE 3.4 compared to 3.0 is like 50%. I dont know what the problem with AMD for doing this.. I just hope it's driver broken and be improved a lot when/if they fix it. If it's hardware downgrade just hope they release new VCE 4.0 with imporvements for Vega instead of adding this crap to it. Vega will not worth with a encoder which can only do 1440p@30fps at "AMD quality mode" which already is worse quality than Intel/NVIDIA.

https://github.com/Xaymar/obs-studio_amf-encoder-plugin/wiki/Hardware-VCE3.0
https://github.com/Xaymar/obs-studio_amf-encoder-plugin/wiki/Hardware-VCE3.4

Cool thanks, I was looking around the wiki but didn't go to the specific VCE version pages.

I ran the test on my Fury while having not rebooted in a while and having lots of stuff open, and got slightly worse than his 285 result, I'll reboot later and not open anything and see how much my result changes. Not sure how many runs or people have tested this or if he is just going off single results from different people.

 

[Shivansps]

VCE 3.4 seems to be actually the exactly the same as GCN 1.0, maybe with some improvements here and there, it cant handle 1080p@60fps@quality preset either, VCE 3.0 on GCN 1.2 can handle it.

Ive been doing some streaming tests and my 2500K (QSV 1.0)seems to have better quality/bitrate as well at very low bitrates. So the H264 encoder on Polaris plain sucks, clear regresion to VCE 2.0 and 3.0, we need to wait for H265, thats the part that should be "new", the problem is, we cant actually use H265 for upload online videos or streaming.

Ok so

This is 1080p@60fps@45mbps with GameDVR, it uses speed profile, then edited and produced at 35mbps with software encoder.

It seems to struggle, specially with dark colors, even before youtube compression destroyed it.

For comparison, i recorded this with a GTX750TI with shadowplay at 1920x1080@35mbps, then edited and produced at 25mbps, also using NVENC.

 

[Shivansps]

Streaming test:
QSV 1.0 (SB) @ 720p@2900kbps

VCE 3.4 @720p@3000kbps

 

[el etro]

Xaymar said in the forums to me that FPS goes down because VCE uses extra power to work. So the GPU hold itself to its power limit when recording, and then the FPS halves(Crysis 3 1440x900 4xMSAA, equals 1920x1200 1xSMAA on hardware tax) gone to ~54FPS to ~31FPS average)). Going up power and fan limit to max makes FPS loss diminish, but GPU power goes up to ~110W.
Anyway record quality is perfect and setting is not even near the lossless one, is just youtube ruining it.

 

[chummy]

So the problem is because AMD Polaris has bad power efficiency then AMD for marketing purpose capped the power feeding to the card and it's causing performance loss when using encoder extra power. How smart is AMD with their false advertisement wanting to promote the card something it's not and in the end cause performance loss.

Why they just dont give up on trying this stupid "green" marketing. They're red, hot and power hungry and that's not a problem when other aspects of card can dimish it like better performance.





Please dial it back a bit. Inflammatory posting here is not allowed.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

 

[el etro]

So the problem is because AMD Polaris has bad power efficiency then AMD for marketing purpose capped the power feeding to the card and it's causing performance loss when using encoder extra power. How smart is AMD with their false advertisement wanting to promote the card something it's not and in the end cause performance loss.

Why they just dont give up on trying this stupid "green" marketing. They're red, hot and power hungry and that's not a problem when other aspects of card can dimish it like better performance.

I see much of a anti-AMD rant in your post. Performance hit using my ex-7950 while recording is about 10%. For me there's just something unkown wrong, likely something easily dolvable on the drivers.



Can someone take this discussion forward to AMD driver team averiguate the problem?

 

[Shivansps]

Power limit? How much power the encoder uses anyway? That seems false to me.

 

[chummy]

When i start encoding it increase something 20-30W.