AMD 9070 XT brings higher quality encode, and video playback performance improvements

While AMD has generally provided excellent value for money for gaming (especially in the case of rasterization), the company has typically struggled in other areas like productivity. One such case is the quality and fidelity of output images when encoding.

Typically, gamers and creators have preferred Nvidia's NVENC encoder as a result of this since it requires AMD's AMF encoder to have higher bitrates in order to match the fidelity. This ultimately means that it gets resource-heavy to do the encoding work on a Radeon GPU.

With the latest RNDA 4-based RX 9070 series graphics cards, AMD is promising some major enhancements in this area on its VCN (Video Core Next). For example, compared to the 7900 XTX, Team Red is showing off much better quality while encoding H.264 (AVC) at 1080p using 6 Mbps bitrate. Speaking of H.264, the new media engine also improves low-latency H.264 encoding at lower bitrates.

In the case of HEVC (H.266), AMD claims an 11% encode quality improvement. AV1 is also seeing encoding efficiency improvements thanks to B Frames. Up to 8K 75 fps encoding is supported for HEVC and AV1, says AMD.

Aside from encoding improvements, decoding is also set to see some big gains. The company says the new VCN version brings low-power video playback with "more than 50% performance uplift for AV1 and VP9". This can be pretty significant since a lot of major web content is on VP9 or AV1. Not much is mentioned about H.264 and H.265 though. Perhaps the company feels there isn't much room for optimization for these codecs.

You can find the entire coverage of our RDNA 4 (RX 9070 series) at this link.

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