The use of hardware acceleration for coding via graphics cards is popular for, among other things, recording and exporting video and livestreaming, for example through the program NOTE. Nvidia’s well-known solution NVENC is both efficient and popular with a wide range of software support. The competitor AMD: s encoder AMF (Advanced Media Framework) has fallen behind, as the support is not as broad for poorer results.
A few months ago, AMD released the update 1.4.24 for the AMF encoder which would improve the image quality, but the interest was cool. Now Chris Griffith has on Code Calamity took the time to investigate how it compares to Nvidia NVENC and Intel Quicksync by encoding part of the movie Big Buck Bunny from Y4M to H.264.
AMD in red, Nvidia in orange and Intel in blue. Image source: Code Calamity
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The results turn out to be good, where AMF gets a VMAF (Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion) result of 95.39 out of 100. This can be compared with 96.13 for NVENC and 96.37 for Quicksync. None of the three can reach software coding with x264, which reaches as far as 97.33, but it is much slower. The test attributes the good result to the addition of B-frames, fill images that contain information from both the previous and next frame. They demonstrate this through a test without B-frameswhere the result for AMF falls to 94.12.
With B-frames in yellow, without B-frames in blue. Image source: Code Calamity
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Code Calamity points out that not all software will be supported B-frames with AMF. It turns out to be true, then for example NOTE does not support the update. This is also the problem for AMD. Although the company’s solution now performs in line with the competition, the more limited software support puts a dent in the wheel for users who want to use the feature. The fact that promising tests are now being released may, however, possibly improve the situation. For those who do not have access to a fortune teller, it remains to be seen what the software support for AMF will look like in the future.
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