Tested: AMD Radeon finally works for content creators with RDNA 3.

It’s hard to believe, but AMD’s Radeon graphics card has never been great at content creation or live streaming workflows. CUDA is the most popular software for video editing. AMF/VCE video encoding uses AMD cards. Historically does not stand up to competition.RDNA 3 however, Radeon RX 7900 seriesIt could change everything.

Although I had only limited access to AMD’s next-generation GPUs to test, I couldn’t resist trying out the encryption capabilities of this new generation and seeing how they worked. Spoiler alert! There is a lot to love right now.

Welcome to the era that is AV1

Produce from AMD’s acquisition of XilinixRDNA 3 GPUs now include Xilinix hardware for the “new Dual Media Engine”. AMD press conferenceIt didn’t provide any details. It seems that the “dual nature” is simply the capacity for simultaneous encoding or decoding, which almost every modern GPU can do. The phrase is meant to sound like a similar improvement over dual AV1 encoders. Creator-friendly RTX 40-series graphics cards from Nvidia.

The hardware change has brought us AV1 encoding ability on AMD’s Radeon Cards too! Supported currently only in OBS 29 betaWhile the implementation of this updated encoder remains to be completed, it is very encouraging.

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Quality-wise it is difficult to see any differences between the lower bitrates AV1 encoded on AMD hardware, Nvidia hardware, or Intel hardware. This is good news! The new AV1 encoder from AMD keeps pace with the competition for recording and archiving purposes and provides that (expected, but not certain) parity to next-generation AMD users.

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Looking at pixels to determine which AV1 encoder performs the best for the upcoming AV1 streaming receiver, tested here at 3.5Mbps and 6Mbps bitrates, AMD’s AV1 quality is right between Intel and Nvidia. It often looks more blurry or blocky than Nvidia encoding but it doesn’t look as blurry as Intel.

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Are you streaming today?

There’s more good news: H264 encoding and HEVC encoding are now available on RDNA3 GPUs. This new hardware setup offers notable quality improvements over the previous generation of AMD encoding.

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The bad news? The quality is still far behind Intel and Nvidia.

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Nvidia and Intel are still at odds over who has the best quality for these scenarios, but AMD isn’t able to keep up.

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This is less relevant at higher bitrates, but it will affect quality at lower bitrates. However, it is worth noting the significant quality jump between RDNA2 and RDNA3 at lower bitrates.

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The quality difference between streamed content and games will be more noticeable the faster they are played. The quality difference between slow games and fast games is less important.

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It’s good to see there are quality improvements. Nvidia has also updated H264 quality. I would be surprised if future Intel generations didn’t see an improvement in this codec. But I admit, I was hoping for more.

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It is not clear if this quality improvement is due to hardware optimization (such as AMD’s alleged AI or machine learning means for improving video quality) or whether these encoders are still running on older AMD hardware. H264 and HEVC encode on older AMD hardware. Task Manager shows older codecs as encoding on hardware other than AV1.

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AMD’s new graphics cards are designed to meet the needs of creators for recording, archiving and the future AV1 streaming. AMD’s H264 streaming performance is not up to par, which is disappointing.

AMD’s superior encryption strength

According to AMD, the H264 encoder can encode 4K video at up-to 180fps H264 and H265, and up to 240fps AV1 and AV1, and 8K at 48fps HEVC and 60fps AV1. Although it is not as impressive, I found it to be quite impressive. RTX 4000 encoding capabilities That’s still cool — but it’s a lot more complicated than that.

This generation seems to have it, which is a great thing. There is no driver lock In encryption sessions. This means that you can encode multiple streams or videos at once until the device begins to lag. I can encode up 6 symbols at a time before a file. Ryzen 9 7950X processorHardware was a nightmare. I spent hours decoding the source footage. That’s great. Nvidia currently limits drivers to 3 encoding sessions per session, but the hardware can do much more.

Coding more than one session at a time is difficult, since the AV1 has a new “High Quality” preset. It limits the video encoder to 100 per cent usage rate with only one 4K 60fps encoder. However, I found it incredibly simple to use. OBS Studio and AMD ReLive both allow for encoding delays. If you aren’t careful, you’ll end with a cut or slideshow-like video. I found that above 1440p, it was most reliable to use “Speed” preset. This preset is not available in ReLive. It means that you will need to use higher bitrates in order to maintain the same quality.

On the bright side, this card would be a great choice for Plex server users who want a lot of simultaneous encoding — once Plex adds support for this hardware, at least.

AMD ReLive lives again

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AMD ships its streaming and recording software with its GPUs in a similar fashion to Nvidia Shadowplay. Except it is far farIn almost all respects Shadowplay is better than Shadowplay. More settings, more capabilities and more features. Nvidia must update Shadowplay immediately.

video editing?

Once I get the chance to use the new AMD cards in practice, I will have to do a full Creators workflow test. However, I did a quick DaVinci resolve test. Bouget systemPugetBench runs on a Radeon RX7900 XT rather than the flagship XTX. It is important to note that the AMD Ryzen 7950X CPU was used in my test bench, instead of the usual 12900k (as I had no remote access). ButThese results are encouraging.

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Radeon 7900 XT appears to outperform last generation RTX 3080 Then there’s the It’s impressive to see 3,090. It still has a long way to go to match the new RTX 4080 and 4090 — but hopefully the even cooler Radeon RX 7900 XTX can make up for that difference. Video editing is sure to be a breeze with the 24GB of memory.

Adam Taylor / IDG

Is AMD back in business?

Based on their connectivity options, it’s hard to believe that media and streaming are secondary considerations for AMD’s limited resources (compared with Nvidia). ButThese cards are now showing some improvement in performance. For those who do AI upscaling, video editing or AV1 encode, I feel more confident recommending AMD’s cards for creators, especially when they are so cheap compared to Nvidia GeForce options.