RDNA 3 is HERE at long last - but does this new generation deliver what streamers and
content creators have been waiting for so they can stop using Nvidia AT LONG LAST?
I don’t think so. Unfortunately, this isn’t a full review. AMD didn’t think this kind of coverage was
worth seeding a launch day sample to and I can now see why - BUT that wasn’t going to stop me from at
least getting you some sort of coverage regarding the encoders and content creation performance.
So consider this an early look while I wait to actually get my hands on the new graphics cards.
Watch my videos ad-free, early and with lots of exclusive content on
my own streaming site Nebula at Nebula dot TV slash EposVox
As a quick note about editing performance - I can’t run my usual benchmarks, but out of
curiosity I ran the PugetBench Resolve benchmark. It’s crucial to note that the PC the 7900XT
I tested was a completely different config from my normal test bed with a Ryzen 7950X
in it instead of the 12900K I usually test with - but with that, the 7900XT scored a
little above the RTX 3080 and even the 3090, but doesn’t keep up with the RTX 4080 or 4090. Still,
I was quite impressed it performed as well as it did, and for the price, AMD might actually
be competitive for video editing again. We’ll look at it more once I have hands on.
Onto encoding, AMD made quick, but big claims about the new cards’ performance here citing a
“dual media engine” without ever saying what that means. I still don’t know what it means. It either
means being able to both decode and encode video, OR perhaps the different silicon involved. Based
on the reporting here in task manager where AV1 and H264 and HEVC are encoded using completely
different hardware units, it’s possible they’re just using normal RDNA style encoding for the
older codecs and only leveraging their new Xilinix hardware - that’s a company they acquired a while
back that specializes in making chips for this kind of thing - purely for AV1. Either way,
you now get H264, HEVC, AND the new open source AV1 codec that I’ve been hyping up for 2 years
now right on this card, keeping it in line with Nvidia and Intel in terms of encoder support.
In OBS, the AMD AV1 Hardware encoder gets some new options, including a “High Quality” preset,
where HEVC and H264 max out at “Quality” and there’s new rate control modes like Quality VBR,
High Quality CBR and so on, but all the new ones error out for me. This OBS implementation is still
in beta, things still need dev time before going into production. Early days and all.
I can’t quantitatively measure AV1 yet - remember this is early days and software support for all 3
is hit or miss at the moment, this is bleeding edge stuff, but I can compare samples capture
in OBS against team blue and green. This is more difficult to compare, but it’s fair to
say RDNA3’s AV1 encoder falls somewhere in-between Intel and Nvidia’s implementations. In fast games
like Apex Legends and Battlefield 2042, AMD AV1 ends up looking blurrier and blockier than Nvidia,
while also losing contrast detail and adding in some color fringing. Intel AV1 on the other hand,
sometimes looks better than both, but sometimes also looks the worst of the bunch. AMD hasn’t done
anything too amazing here, but they are at least competitive right out of the gate, which I like.
The only program that supports AMD AV1 right now is OBS. FFMPEG and Handbrake don’t support it yet,
the Rigaya encoder I usually reference has a broken implementation that errors out no matter
what I do, and neither Premiere nor Resolve have it yet, so I can’t test it there yet.
So it’s cool for recording, but since you can’t use AV1 for much else just yet on AMD,
how’s H264 doing. I was really worried that AMD would just be slapping the Xilinix AV1
encoder in here and moving forward with the same RDNA2 H264 and H265 encoders,
which still aren’t great despite some minor updates - BUT good news! This does seem to be
a new encoder stack, and with that the quality has improved a bit. H264 VMAF,
PSNR, and SSIM scores all seem to improve upon RDNA2 scores, however they do still
fall a bit far behind both the RTX 4000 series and Arc’s QuickSync implementation.
So it’s progress, but again, nothing amazing.
For a dose of “don’t piss off the fanboys on launch day” I do have some good things to say
about AMD ReLive! Last time I looked at it, I really did not like this software at all,
but it’s since received a complete overhaul and is actually fantastic. On the recording
and streaming side, AMD just outright EMBARASSES both Nvidia and Intel in terms of features. You
can select between H264, H265 and AV1 encoders for recording, set audio and video bitrates,
it looks like surround audio would be supported, you can set up instant replays,
replays to play overtop your game while streaming, and even make GIFs of your highlights?! Plus the
hotkeys section reveals screen region recording is a thing. Shadowplay has been in desperate need for
updates for quite some time, and this is just more reason it needs it. Arc Control… I won’t go there.
Another good note is that the AV1 encoder supports 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, which
means you can record with lossless color compression to make for better upscaling,
punch-ins and so on. This is important for workflows like mine and both Intel and AMD
support it, but Nvidia’s AV1 encoder is stuck only supporting 4:2:0. Lame.
Then we have to talk about AMD’s claims about encoder performance.
This is where things get dicey. In the reviewer’s guide - which only has a single TEENY TINY section
dedicated to anything encoding or content creation, by the way - AMD states that the
H264 encoder can encoder 4K up to 180FPS in H264 and H265 and up to 240FPS in AV1,
and 8K at 48FPS in HEVC and 60FPS in AV1. I’m not so sure this is actually true.
This section is also where they again refer to the “dual media engine” and says it “allows
two simultaneous encode or decode streams for AVC and HEVC up to 8K60” so naturally
I was curious to take a deeper look at what the encode capacity actually is for this hardware.
I also wanted to note that AMD also recommends a massive wordvomit of custom FFMPEG settings
for reviewers to test with the shiny new OBS implementation… this is kinda ridiculous. If
these options are recommended, they should be baked into the implementation. I have no
clue what’s going on here and they cannot expect end users to be doing it this way.
Regarding hardware encoding capacity, I have good news and bad news.
At 4K and higher, this card struggles a LOT. The “High Quality” preset with AV1 just pegs
the encoder at 100% and it’s very easy to trip into encoder lag territory and the
whole recording goes downhill. To most reliable do 4K60 I had to do Quality, or often Speed and
this is JUST trying to capture desktop stuff most of the time. Most gameplay capture tests I did,
I had to drop to Speed preset to let it keep up. The good news there is the Speed preset only hits
about 25% usage. So when using Speed I was able to successfully hit 4 simultaneous 4K60 AV1 encodes,
which is damn impressive. More than the two AMD promises - which is good news. 8K
had to be run on Speed or it would lag out, and I could only get 1 of those at a time.
The High Quality preset on 1080p also hits the encoder very hard
with only two 1080p60 High Quality AV1 encodes being possible at one time.
But since I did manage 4 simultaneous encodes, I was wondering how far their limit goes and as
best I can tell, there is NO artificial driver limitation on encode sessions like Nvidia has.
I was able to queue up 6 encode sessions - 4 1080p AV1 encodes to max out that chip,
then 2 more H264 ones. I hit encoding lag trying to fire up number 7 and that
was ONLY because the poor Ryzen 7950X CPU was the bottleneck in trying to encode the
lossless utvideo codec for each one of these source files over and over!
Wild stuff and will hopefully help put more pressure on Nvidia to unlock our sessions,
as 3 just isn’t good enough for what the RTX 4000 cards can do as I showed in a previous video.
I tried testing 4K240 and 180 as the press kit states, but
just never got it to work, but I’ll explore more in the future.
So far, I’m impressed and excited. I struggle to decide where I stand yet, due to the limited
access I’ve had so far. Based on what I’ve seen, gaming performance goes toe to toe with
the RTX 4080 for significantly cheaper, and as mentioned it MIGHT beat out RTX 3000 series for
video editing. If that performance keeps up under more scrutiny and we later explore more 3D and VFX
workflows, AMD could be competitive again. Their encoder generally falls behind the competition in
most ways - but not necessarily ways that matter to people who are going to buy AMD
cards. AMD users have historically felt their streaming/content creation workflows are an
afterthought, and I think we’re finally reaching the point of it being a full… current… thought.
Click this video here to see how AMD’s competition is doing with RTX
4000’s insane encoding capabilities, and this video to learn more about
where AMD’s H264 encoding stands with previous generation cards. Remember to be kind, rewind.