Video Core Next is AMD's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware

core Core or cores may refer to: Science and technology * Core (anatomy), everything except the appendages * Core (laboratory), a highly specialized shared research resource * Core (manufacturing), used in casting and molding * Core (optical fiber ...

. It is a family of hardware accelerator designs for encoding and decoding video, and is built into AMD's

GPUs A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

and

APUs Apus is a small constellation in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere, southern sky. It represents a bird-of-paradise, and its name means "without feet" in Greek language, Greek because the bird-of-paradise was once wrongly believed to lack feet. ...

since AMD Raven Ridge, released January 2018.

Background

Video Core Next is AMD's successor to both the

Unified Video Decoder Unified Video Decoder (UVD, previously called Universal Video Decoder) is the name given to AMD's dedicated video decoding ASIC. There are multiple versions implementing a multitude of video codecs, such as H.264 and VC-1. UVD was introduced wit ...

and Video Coding Engine designs, which are hardware accelerators for video decoding and encoding, respectively. It can be used to decode, encode and

transcode Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video data files, audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target de ...

("sync") video streams, for example, a

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...

Blu-ray Disc Blu-ray (Blu-ray Disc or BD) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage format designed to supersede the DVD format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released worldwide on June 20, 2006, capable of storing several hours of ...

to a format appropriate to, for example, a

smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...

. Unlike video encoding on a CPU or a general-purpose GPU, Video Core Next is a dedicated hardware core on the processor die. This

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-efficienc ...

(ASIC) allows for more power-efficient video processing.

Feature set

All versions of VCN support:

MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods ...

Decode,

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related ...

Decode, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Encode/Decode,

HEVC 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 co ...

(H.265) Encode/Decode, and VP9 Decode. 10-bit color depth in the P010 format is supported. VCN 1.0 supports up to 4K resolution. VCN 2.0 and beyond supports up to 8K. Support for H.264 and H.265 Encode methods differ among generations (see below).

VC-1 SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, ...

Decode is supported until VCN 3.0.33. VCN 2.0 is implemented with Navi products and the Renoir APU. The feature set remains the same as VCN 1.0. VCN 3.0 is implemented with Navi 2 products. VCN 3.0 implements H.264 B-frames, which was present in Video Coding Engine 2.0 but taken out with VCE 3.0. VCN 4.0 adds AV1 encode. H.264 quality is higher with VCN 4.0 (as part of RDNA 3) compared to previous generations, but still lags behind Intel and Nvidia hardware codecs. There is no support for encoding or decoding in YUV422 and YUV444 in H.264 and H.265.

Quality

Early version of AMD VCN had lower overall quality ( VMAF) compared to offerings from Intel and Nvidia. B-frame narrowed the gap, but did not eliminate it; further improvemnts, including pre-analysis, resulted in nearly equivalent performance to competitors at the release of VCN 4.0. Despite a lack of B-frame support, H.265 provides better quality ( VMAF) and near-identical speed for the same bitrate compared to H.264 on VCN 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0.

References

External links

AMF
AMD's software API for VCN and earlier media functions. Release notes indicates feature additions without mentioning hardware versions.
VCEEnc
a command-line program exposing most configurable options from AMF. Allows HDR10+ with VCN H.265.
FastFlix
a graphical frontend for VCEEnc and other encoders. {{ATI Video acceleration AMD IP cores Video compression and decompression ASIC

Background

Feature set

Quality

See also

Video hardware technologies

Nvidia

AMD

Intel

References

External links