Quality of AMD AMF encoder has improved significantly

After nearly a decade of quality issues, AMD introduced B-frames in AMF 1.4.24, giving the encoder a huge boost in image quality. When AMD released the Radeon RX 6000 series based on the RDNA 2 architecture, it said that it would add the H.264 encoder. After a long wait, AMD finally fulfilled its promise.

Over the past few years, AMD’s hardware encoder has been lagging behind Intel and Nvidia, which is also criticized by many content creators. Recently, Code Calamity conducted a preliminary test of AMD’s update and confirmed that the addition of B-frames is indeed helpful. The AMF encoder is close to Nvidia’s latest NVENC encoder in GeForce RTX 20/30 series GPUs.

According to Code Calamity’s test method, the results show that Nvidia’s NVENC score is 96.13, Intel’s QuickSync score is 96.37, and AMD’s AMF encoder is only about 0.5 points behind.Most of the time, AMD’s encoders are inferior to Nvidia’s NVENC or Intel’s QuickSync, which is nothing like it was more than a decade ago. After Nvidia introduced the sixth-generation NVENC encoder on the GeForce RTX 20 series, encoding performance got a big boost, and in the years since, AMD has never caught up.

Recently, AMD seems to be showing signs of strength in codecs. After all, in today’s PC applications, streaming media, and content creation occupy a considerable part of the content. It is understood that the RDNA 3 architecture GPU will support H.264, H.265 encoding, and AV1 encoding.