Monday, December 30th 2024
AMD "Navi 48" To Feature AV1 Hardware Encoders with B-Frame Support
The "Navi 48" silicon powering AMD's next-generation Radeon RX 9070 series could feature AV1 hardware-accelerated encoding with support for AV1 B-Frames. In video compression, a B-frame is an intermediate frame that lacks image information, but has motion-vector and other data from the previous and next image frames (or I-frames), which helps the decoder reconstruct the image component of the frame based on temporal frame data. This is compute-intensive, but greatly reduces file-size or bitrate of the stream, as almost every other frame lacks image information. Support for AV1 B-Frame hardware-accelerated encode was sniffed out by HXL in a recent commit to one of the SDKs AMD maintains in a public repository through its GPUOpen initiative.
AMD's Radeon RX 9000 series generation powered by the RDNA 4 graphics architecture will be based almost entirely on two chips, the "Navi 48" and "Navi 44," with the latter powering mainstream and mid-range SKUs; while the former powers performance-segment ones. There is no enthusiast-segment chip this time around. The "Navi 48" is expected to feature a more advanced video encode/decode hardware than the one RDNA 3.5 comes with; and AV1 is likely to get the bulk of development as the royalty-free codec gains popularity with online video streaming services. It remains to be seen if next-generation architectures like RDNA 4 or NVIDIA's "Blackwell" support acceleration for VVC.
Source:
HXL (Twitter)
AMD's Radeon RX 9000 series generation powered by the RDNA 4 graphics architecture will be based almost entirely on two chips, the "Navi 48" and "Navi 44," with the latter powering mainstream and mid-range SKUs; while the former powers performance-segment ones. There is no enthusiast-segment chip this time around. The "Navi 48" is expected to feature a more advanced video encode/decode hardware than the one RDNA 3.5 comes with; and AV1 is likely to get the bulk of development as the royalty-free codec gains popularity with online video streaming services. It remains to be seen if next-generation architectures like RDNA 4 or NVIDIA's "Blackwell" support acceleration for VVC.
31 Comments on AMD "Navi 48" To Feature AV1 Hardware Encoders with B-Frame Support
It will be good if TPU publishes image quality tests of AV1 videos encoded with the new cards from Intel, AMD and Nvidia.I really hope that all GPUs from all manufacturers do not encode and decode the VVC codec, and that computer companies unite to continue developing only free codecs from AOMedia project (AV2, AV3, AV4, etc.).
* I-frames are a full-image.
* P-frames are forward progressive frames. They say how the "last" image moved to make this new one, and thus have much less data than an I-frame. Most frames in today's video formats are P-frames.
* B-frames are forward-AND-backwards progressive frames. They use both "past" AND "future" images (usually future I-frames) plus the previous I-frames, and all the P-frames in between, to calculate the current frame. These offer the highest levels of compression but obviously have the largest possibility of noise, errors and other such problems.Better compression, if this actually works.
B-frames are considered the hardest to calculate.
Quality is funny and very complex. Maybe better maybe worse, we will see when it comes out.
Does anybody know if current video editors are ready to take advantage of this? DaVinci Resolve? Final cut etc?
Thank you ⚡
www.anandtech.com/show/14270/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1650-review-feat-zotac/2
Does anyone use H266 currently?
If you doing recordings which should be done on fixed quality, then the B frames should give you a smaller file size. On something like CBR for streaming it would be increased quality.
It's not a new concept. It been in standard use for years, in Bluray (h264), BR UHD (h265), and older codecs such as MPEG4 ASP (like Xvid).
In x264 encodes with common settings, 70-75% of the your output frames would likely be B frames.
It's not image generation. It doesn't interpolate with no reference, but rather, it compresses source frames.
I believe the European DVB system is also receiving a new revision to support the codec, as the name implies it is "versatile" and works particularly well for over the air digital TV broadcasting as it is capable of retaining decent image quality at low bit rates and the adaptive resolution capability is of particular interest for this use. It will work great for internet streaming as well, the problem remains licensing.