Video Code Engine (VCE, was earlier referred to as Video Coding Engine, Video Compression Engine or Video Codec Engine in official AMD documentation) is AMD's video encoding

application-specific integrated circuit An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-effici ...

implementing the

video codec A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while a device that only compresses is typically called an '' ...

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. Since 2012 it was integrated into all of their GPUs and

APUs Apus is a small constellation in the southern sky. It represents a bird-of-paradise, and its name means "without feet" in Greek because the bird-of-paradise was once wrongly believed to lack feet. First depicted on a celestial globe by Petrus ...

except Oland. VCE was introduced with the Radeon HD 7000 Series on 22 December 2011. VCE occupies a considerable amount of the die surface at the time of its introduction and is not to be confused with AMD's Unified Video Decoder (UVD). As of AMD Raven Ridge (released January 2018), UVD and VCE were succeeded by Video Core Next (VCN).

Overview

The handling of video data involves computation of

data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressi ...

algorithms and possibly of

video processing In electronics engineering, video processing is a particular case of signal processing, in particular image processing, which often employs video filters and where the input and output signals are video files or video streams. Video processing t ...

algorithms. As the template compression methods shows, lossy video compression algorithms involve the steps:

motion estimation Motion estimation is the process of determining ''motion vectors'' that describe the transformation from one 2D image to another; usually from adjacent frames in a video sequence. It is an ill-posed problem as the motion is in three dimensions b ...

(ME), discrete cosine transform (DCT), and entropy encoding (EC). AMD Video Code Engine (VCE) is a full hardware implementation of the video codec H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. It is capable of delivering 1080p at 60 frames/sec. Because its entropy encoding block is also a separately accessible Video Codec Engine, it can be operated in two modes: full-fixed mode and hybrid mode. By employing AMD APP SDK, available for Linux and Microsoft Windows, developers can create hybrid encoders that pair custom motion estimation, inverse discrete cosine transform and motion compensation with the hardware entropy encoding to achieve faster than real-time encoding. In hybrid mode, only the entropy encoding block of the VCE unit is used, while the remaining computation is offloaded to the 3D engine of the GPU, so the computing scales with the number of available compute units (CUs).

VCE 1.0

As of April 2014, there are two versions of VCE. Version 1.0 supports H.264 YUV420 (I & P frames), H.264 SVC Temporal Encode VCE, and ''Display Encode Mode'' (DEM). It can be found on: * Piledriver-based ** Trinity APUs (Ax-5xxx, e.g. A10-5800K) ** Richland APUs (Ax-6xxx, e.g. A10-6800K) * GPUs of the Southern Islands generation (GCN1: CAYMAN, ARUBA (Trinity/Richland), CAPE VERDE, PITCAIRN, TAHITI). These are ** Radeon HD 7700 series (except HD 7790 with VCE 2.0) ** Radeon HD 7800 series ** Radeon HD 7900 series ** Radeon HD 8570 to 8990 (except HD 8770 with VCE 2.0) ** Radeon R7 250E, 250X, 265 / R9 270, 270X, 280, 280X ** Radeon R7 360, 370, 455 / R9 370, 370X ** Mobile Radeon HD 77x0M to HD 7970M ** Mobile Radeon HD 8000-Series ** Mobile Radeon Rx M2xx Series (except R9 M280X with VCE 2.0 and R9 M295X with VCE 3.0) ** Mobile Radeon R5 M330 to R9 M390 ** FirePro cards with 1st Generation GCN (GCN1) (Except W2100, which is Oland XT)

VCE 2.0

Compared to the first version, VCE 2.0 adds H.264 YUV444 (I-Frames), B-frames for H.264 YUV420, and improvements to the DEM (Display Encode Mode), which results in a better encoding quality. It can be found on: *

Steamroller A steamroller (or steam roller) is a form of road roller – a type of heavy construction machinery used for leveling surfaces, such as roads or airfields – that is powered by a steam engine. The leveling/flattening action is achieved throug ...

-based ** Kaveri APUs (Ax-7xxx, e.g. A10-7850K) ** Godavari APUs (Ax-7xxx, e.g. A10-7890K) *

Jaguar The jaguar (''Panthera onca'') is a large cat species and the only living member of the genus ''Panthera'' native to the Americas. With a body length of up to and a weight of up to , it is the largest cat species in the Americas and the thi ...

-based ** Kabini APUs (e.g. Athlon 5350, Sempron 2650) ** Temash APUs (e.g. A6-1450, A4-1200) *

Puma Puma or PUMA may refer to: Animals * ''Puma'' (genus), a genus in the family Felidae ** Puma (species) or cougar, a large cat Businesses and organisations * Puma (brand), a multinational shoe and sportswear company * Puma Energy, a mid- and d ...

-based ** Beema and Mullins * GPUs of the Sea Islands generation as well Bonaire or Hawaii GPUs (2nd Generation Graphics Core Next), such as ** Radeon HD 7790, 8770 ** Radeon R7 260, 260X / R9 290, 290X, 295X2 ** Radeon R7 360 / R9 390, 390X ** Mobile Radeon R9 M280X ** Mobile Radeon R9 M385, M385X ** Mobile Radeon R9 M470, M470X ** FirePro cards with 2nd Generation GCN (GCN2)

VCE 3.0

Video Code Engine 3.0 (VCE 3.0) technology features a new high-quality video scaling and

High Efficiency Video Coding High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In compa ...

(HEVC/H.265). It, together with UVD 6.0, can be found on 3rd generation of Graphics Core Next (GCN3) with "Tonga", "Fiji", "Iceland", and "Carrizo" (VCE 3.1) based graphics controller hardware, which is now used AMD Radeon Rx 300 Series (Pirate Islands GPU family) and VCE 3.4 by actual AMD Radeon Rx 400 Series and AMD Radeon 500 Series (both Polaris GPU family). * Tonga: Radeon R9 285, 380, 380X; Mobile Radeon R9 M390X, M395, M395X, M485X * Tonga XT: FirePro W7100, S7100X, S7150, S7150 X2 * Fiji: Radeon R9 Fury, Fury X, Nano; Radeon Pro Duo (2016); FirePro S9300, W7170M * Polaris: RX 460, 470, 480; RX 550, 560, 570, 580; Radeon Pro Duo (2017)

VCE 4.0

The Video Code Engine 4.0 encoder and UVD 7.0 decoder are included in the Vega-based GPUs.

VCE 4.1

AMD's Vega20 GPU, present in the Instinct Mi50, Instinct Mi60 and Radeon VII cards, include VCE 4.1 and two UVD 7.2 instances.

Feature overview

APUs

GPUs

Operating system support

The VCE SIP core needs to be supported by the

device driver In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and o ...

. The device driver provides one or multiple interfaces, e. g. OpenMAX IL. One of these interfaces is then used by end-user software, like

GStreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes the ...

or HandBrake (HandBrake rejected VCE support in December 2016, but added it in December 2018), to access the VCE hardware and make use of it. AMD's proprietary device driver AMD Catalyst is available for multiple operating systems and support for VCE was added to it. Additionally, a free device driver is available. This driver also supports the VCE hardware.

Linux

* Initial VCE support was added on 4 February 2014 by Christian König of AMD to the free radeon driver. * Gallium3D state tracker for

OpenMAX OpenMAX (Open Media Acceleration), often shortened as "OMX", is a non-proprietary and royalty-free cross-platform set of C-language programming interfaces. It provides abstractions for routines that are especially useful for processing of audio, ...

was added 24 October 2013 to Mesa 3D. * The free and open-source Radeon driver was adapted to use OpenMAX with the

OpenMAX (gst-omx) support for exposing the VCE video encode engine. * AMD employee Leo Liu implemented h264 level support into the Mesa 3D state tracker.

Windows

The software "MediaShow Espresso Video Transcoding" seems to utilize VCE and UVD to the fullest extent possible.

XSplit Broadcaster XSplit is a live streaming and video-mixing application developed and maintained by SplitmediaLabs. It is mostly used for capturing gameplay for live streaming or video recording purposes. A Steam version was published by Devolver Digital on 12 ...

supports VCE from version 1.3. Open Broadcaster Software (OBS Studio) supports VCE for recording and streaming. The original Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) requires a fork build in order to enable VCE. AMD Radeon Software supports VCE with built in game capture ("Radeon ReLive") and use AMD AMF/VCE on APU or Radeon Graphics card to reduce FPS drop when capturing game or video content. HandBrake added Video Coding Engine support in version 1.2.0 in December 2018.

Successor

The VCE was succeeded by AMD Video Core Next in the Raven Ridge series of APUs released in October 2017. The VCN combines both encode (VCE) and decode (UVD).

References

{{AMD graphics Video acceleration AMD IP cores Video compression and decompression ASIC