[FFmpeg-user] GPU for Transcoding (RADEON x NVIDIA)

[Dennis Mungai]

On Wed, 20 Nov 2019, 02:03 Christian David, <davidchristia at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello FFMPEG community, i'm newbie with video processing and i have the
> following application for ffmpeg, currently using an Nvidia quadro p5000
> for transcoding an 1080p input to 4 outputs (360p, 480p, 720p and 1080p),
> and my question is.. there's an Radeon GPU to race with NVIDIA to do the
> same thing or Nvidia is the best solution? take consideration for server
> solutions, not desktop.
>

AMD's VCE is practically dead in the water.
Be it through both AMF and VAAPI, expect atrocious encoding quality for
H.264/AVC *especially* on newer GPUs where they gimped VCE to implement
HEVC encoding.

In the same vein, the same cannot be said of their HEVC encoder
implementation....*if* you can get it to work via AMF ( ffmpeg has a Vulkan
interop for that) , it's surprisingly good.

For now stick to NVIDIA. NVENC is pretty solid especially on the prosumer
GPUs. Make sure you've got enough VRAM for your encoding workload and
you're set.

A better solution than AMD's VCE would be Intel's QuickSync. Ffmpeg
supports both the proprietary mediasdk QSV and the open source VAAPI
encoders, with far better performance and quality than VCE.

For your workload, a cheap Xeon CPU with Iris integrated graphics *might*
serve you better than VCE.

>