Video Core Next

Video Core Next is AMD's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core. It is a family of hardware accelerator designs for encoding and decoding video, and is built into AMD's GPUs and APUs since AMD Raven Ridge, released January 2018.

Background
Video Core Next is AMD's successor to both the Unified Video Decoder and Video Coding Engine designs, which are hardware accelerators for video decoding and encoding, respectively. It can be used to decode, encode and transcode ("sync") video streams, for example, a DVD or Blu-ray Disc to a format appropriate to, for example, a smartphone. 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 (ASIC) allows for more power-efficient video processing.

Feature set
All versions of VCN support: MPEG-2 Decode, MPEG-4 Decode, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Encode/Decode, HEVC (H.265) Encode/Decode, and VP9 Decode. 10-bit color 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 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
AMD VCN has lower overall quality (VMAF) compared to offerings from Intel and Nvidia. B-frame narrows the gap, but does not eliminate it. With pre-analysis enabled too, the gap is almost closed.

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.

Nvidia

 * PureVideo - Nvidia
 * GeForce 256's Motion Compensation
 * High-Definition Video Processor
 * Video Processing Engine
 * Nvidia NVENC
 * Nvidia NVDEC

AMD

 * Video Core Next - AMD
 * Video Coding Engine - AMD
 * Unified Video Decoder - AMD
 * Video Shader - ATI

Intel
Qualcomm
 * Quick Sync Video - Intel
 * Clear Video - Intel


 * Qualcomm Hexagon