Hardware encoding not available on RX 7800 XT, but available on 3070 Ti?!

[Lost in Gaming]

I had an Asus ROG Strix 3070 Ti OC 8GB GPU recently which turned out to be having a factory defect, I had to buy a new GPU, and since I'm extremely frustrated with Nvidia these days I bought a Sapphire RX 7800 XT 16GB, which is approximately between a 4070 and 4070 Super in performance. as far as I know. With RTX 3070 Ti I had no issues using Hardware encoding with the following settings on v24.4.1:

Format: H.264

Frame Size: UHD (3840x2160)
Frame Rate: 120
Field Order: Progressive
Aspect: Square Pixels
Render at maximum depth
Use maximum render quality
Time Interpolation: Frame Sampling
Performance: Hardware Encoding
Profile: High
Level: 6.0
Bitrate Encoding: VBR, 1 pass
Target Bitrate: 100
Max Bitrate: 100

Now, I'm trying to use the same encoding settings on my new RX 7800 XT, however, in v24.4.1 adobe simply won't use Hardware encoding, even though I'm able to choose it, simply does the encoding with CPU. CPU usage is around 90%, GPU is 20%. A 2 min video takes 10 mins to encode, which is really not good.

With v25.1  I'm not even able to switch to hardware encoding because Adobe Premiere Pro tells me that my system's hardware does not support hardware acceleration for the current settings. I mean, really? RX 7800 XT is 1 gen ahead of 3070 Ti and it's not supporting Level 6.0 encoding and with 120 FPS? That's not really accepatable. How come the same encoding format is not available on ana AMD GPU but it's available on an Nvidia GPU even if the Nvidia GPU is one gen older and definitely slower? Does Adobe have any deal with Nvidia perhaps?

[Sumeet Kumar Choubey]

Hi Lost in Gaming,

Could you please confirm if you are able to use hardware encoding for lower frame rates or with HEVC format? Also, for testing purposes, could you try the latest version of Premiere Pro & let us know if it's working properly?

Thanks,

Sumeet

[Lost in Gaming]

Hi

Yea I'm able to use H.265 instead even on the highest 6.0 level and hardware is used as I see. Although 120 FPS videos are still kinda slow. I just rendered a video that was about 23 minutes long and it took about 50 minutes to render it with H.265 with the following settings, also I used a "Sharpen" effect set to 15:

Format: H.265

Frame Size: UHD (3840x2160)
Frame Rate: 120
Aspect: Square Pixels
Render at maximum depth
Use maximum render quality
Time Interpolation: Optical Flow
Performance: Hardware Encoding
Profile: Main 10 (should've used Main perhaps?)
Level: 5.2

Tier: High
Bitrate Encoding: CBR (probably VBR is making rendering faster too?)
Target Bitrate: 100

[R Neil Haugen]

First, only recently have any AMD GPUs had any long-GOP hardware encoding available. It wasn't Nvidia or Adobe's fault, but AMDs. They simply didn't put that in.

Now, some AMD GPUs do have long-GOP hardware, and I'm not up on whether that one does or not. But as AMD never had any capabilities, the software people are now having to add code for AMD GPUs like they wrote for Nvidia ones a long time ago. And of course, having to learn what works better in coding for AMD GPUs when writing the new code in the app.

It may take another year before all the video post apps get the AMD cards down. This has also been an issue in Resolve, of course. It isn't "just Adobe".

[JonesVid]

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[Lost in Gaming]

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[JonesVid]

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[Lost in Gaming]

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[Lost in Gaming]

Little off-topic regarding the codec itself but i noticed that with h.265 my general sharpness is extremely reduced no matter what I do. I mean i can do a sharpness effect with 15-20 points but that is also reducing image quality. 😞 Do we know why adobe premiere pro does this on AMD GPU? I didn't have this sharpnesss difference with Nvidia GPU.

Not sure if the difference will be visible, this one is the original:

This one is the unmodified (no sharpness effect) just rendered with my usualy settings:

[RjL190365]

It's not Adobe. AMD's encoding quality has always lagged behind that of Nvidia and Intel regardless of which software you're using for encoding. In fact, the encoding quality on even the latest AMD GPUs is only about on a par with an Nvidia GPU from 2016 (the GeForce GTX 10 series).

[Lost in Gaming]

So there could be no resolve to this? Only with the sharpness trick to increase video sharpness with effect, then it gets rendered to almost the same level? But this makes no sense to be honest. AMD Adrenaline recording is also using HEVC codec. The same codec that is used during h.264 rendering in Adobe Premiere Pro, isn't it? That's the wierd thing. I recorded with AMD Adrenaline and both AV1 and HEVC are extreme sharp, just perfect, but after rendering my video no matter if I render in the same resolution or in 4K the image gets blurry. And only with some sharpness effect with 15-20 amount gets the image sharpness back to original state. However because of the effect, something else gets a little distorted.

[RjL190365]

I'm afraid that you're stuck with it. It's a hardware limitation. AMD Radeon GPUs do a lousy job of producing quality hardware transcodes compared to Nvidia GPUs and Intel GPUs (and transcoding quality and recording/streaming quality are two completely different animals when it comes to hardware encoding quality). The only workaround is software encoding, in your case. And you must select software encoding manually in the video settings of the export window with each and every timeline that you'd be exporting; otherwise, the encoder selection will default to hardware encoding, which will bring you back to square one (in this case, the mercy of the hardware encoder image quality gremlins).

[Lost in Gaming]

Yea well. My games were crashing with 3070 Ti so it's still better to render a little longer than having crashing all the time and restart the whole recording. Such a wasted time. However my CPU rendering is extreme slow. I'm just rendering a 30 second clip and it takes 20 minutes, that's really hardcore. Software rendering is even wierder in Adobe Premiere Pro for me. It's starts with quite fast, first saying it'd take about 30-50 seconds to complete, then stops at around 10% and then nothing happens, just the counter keeps going up.

[Fergus H]

@Lost in Gaming Thanks for your response to Sumeet and the additional information. Would you be willing to share a project with us that we can use to reproduce this issue? It can be a short version of the project you were trying to export. What would also be helpful is knowing your exact export settings.  

I moved your post to the Bugs section of our forum. While I don't recall the exact details of hardware encoding differences between the NVIDIA 3070 Ti and the AMD RX 7800 XT, we will check and get back to you. 

Regards,

Fergus

P.S. To keep this discussion on track, I removed some posts that discussed decoding performance, which are unrelated to your question. 

[Lost in Gaming]

Hi,

Yeah the initial question was answered. I'll probably open a separate discussion on suggestions how to increase CPU rendering. Because currently it's really bad. 😄

[Fergus H]

@Lost in Gaming Actually, I'm not sure if we (Adobe) did give you a complete answer about why something you could do with the NVIDIA card can't be done with the AMD card. Today is a day off for Adobe employees but I've reached out to our colleagues at AMD for their take and we'll do some more testing. I believe we have the same card as you in our lab, so this is something we can test. Hang tight and we'll get back to you! Oh, a project and your settings would still be very useful if you're willing to share.

Regards,

Fergus