This is a good question and I would be interested too, as I am also interested in an RX5700 (XT).

Not only H.265 hardware GPU support, but also H.264 of course.

If anyone has this graphics card already, and uses PowerDirector 17, it would be nice if he could write here.

Since you ask, maybe the following will help in your RX 5700 questions.

In my opinion, AMD, VCE, and PD have not been a good combination for yrs. Nothing wrong with the GPU’s, it’s the encoder block that has issues with PD and CL appears to not put in much effort to resolve. Like here https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/50731.page#post_box_266999 when CL promotes in beta as ready and major retraction immediately, end users shouldn’t have to provide this insight. Another high-level synopsis of issues provided here: https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/65974.page#post_box_300990 might be of value in your choice.
Attached is a table of a few results of basic transcoding an input file to various PD default profiles and then a actual project with variable source video converted to H.265 as that was your interest.

Keep in mind, PD has yet to incorporate or take advantage of features provided in the Turing GPU, maybe PD18 will finally bring some real support.

So basically, the RX 5700 appears to have very questionable behavior with PD17 release 3005, bitrate not as intended with H.265 a major issue which causes severe artifacts. Also a issue with prior AMD GPU's as was noted in some of the previous links.

If you want a direct comparison of some particular Produce format and a timeline of yours feel free to PM me a PD pack project you’ve shared someplace.

Encode Ratio = (Wall time/Encode time)
RTX 2070, Nvidia 431.36 driver
RX 5700, AMD Adrenalin 19.7.2 driver

Jeff

In a ray of good news, it appears the under achieving bitrate that was also shown recently here with a RX560 https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/79239.page#post_box_325684 has been corrected in a recent patch and now PD17 3005 does produce the stated bitrates of the basic profiles for H.265 with the RX560.

So maybe at some time in the future the RX 5700 may produce proper H.265 profile bitrates too with PD17. Either way, it appears to still fall short of Nvidia H.265 encode performance with PD17.

Jeff

The instability and quirks of AMD encoding made me switch from the RX580 to the present nvidia GTX1080.
I didn't test the AMD with latest PD patch, that card is in my daughter PC now...

I had high hopes for AMD's hybrid encoding. Not materialized yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Coding_Engine#Overview

So I've now got said 5700xt installed in my machine and tried some h265 encodes vs intel quicksync.

There seems to be a problem either with PD365 or the AMD drivers, as no matter what bitrate I choose the output is blocky and the filesize is half that of the quicksync output.


This seems to match what Jeff wrote however I'm using the latest version of PD365 (shows as 17.6.3004.0) so is there another patch I should know about?

Cheers,
Lee.

Quote This seems to match what Jeff wrote however I'm using the latest version of PD365 (shows as 17.6.3004.0) so is there another patch I should know about?

I don't think there is any patch to know about, 3004 I believe is the latest for PD365 users and 3005 for PD17 perpetual users. Why the dichotomy, ask the brains at CL Dev. Basically, PD365 has interim added features that PD17 perpetual users are not privy too through the patch cycle.

As I had written and you observe as well, the RX 5700 appears to have very questionable behavior with PD17 release 3005, bitrate not as intended with H.265 a major issue which causes severe artifacts.

Keep in mind, the RX5700 is the first VCN (Video Core Next) which is the new GPU media block that handles both video encode and decode. VCN succeeds the UVD video decoding and VCE video encoding blocks that have been around for many generations of AMD GPU's now, but as I mentioned, had multiple issues in PD and rather recently H.265 bitrate issue appears to be improved for the RX560 (older VCE series).

So basically, I think you are stuck until CL and/or AMD resolve issues and properly support VCN in a PD release.


Jeff

Have these RX5700XT issues been resolved with the latest drivers. I see PD18 has a patch addressing VCN 2.0?