Has anyone tried the new Navi hevc encoder?

So, i’m in the market for a new GPU. My budget is around $400, so the plan was to get either a 2060super or a 2070. The goal was to get a midrange gaming gpu with decent support for encoding/transcoding, and the 2060super/2070 with it’s turing nvenc chip hit the spot perfectly. That is until Navi cards showed up.

The information on the new Navi AMF encoder is scarce, so far. There are a few random reddit threads, and there are a couple of youtube videos by EposVox, but none of these really go into much detail. Actually, that’s not true - EposVox does go into some detail in his videos, but his primary focus is Twitch streaming - so he’s tailoring his findings to that particular scenario (6Kmbps etc). From all the reading and youtubing i’ve done i have figured out that the new AMF is fast, really fast… supposedly much faster then nvenc, especially when combined with a pcie4 mobo. It can also run at least 4 threads vs 2 for nvenc. So faster, with double the threads - all sounds good so far.

The problem is that i cannot find any info about the quality of the files it produces. This is not helped by the fact that everyone posting their findings so far seems to be focusing on Twitch and the 6Kmbps bitrate. I cannot find anything about how this encoder behaves at 2k or 3kmpbs etc.

So, has anyone here got their hands on one of the new Navi cards ? Have you had a chance to try AMF ? Are you happy with the results ? If you tried both, do you think AMF is on par with the turing nvenc ?

If you have an AMD card, try today’s 2.5.1 BETA build, it now support automatic detection of NVidia (CUDA/NvEnc), Intel (QuickSync) and AMD (AMF/VCE) hardware and enables the hardware acceleration automatically.

The main benefit from AMD is the unlimited encode sessions. Nvidia has an artificial 2 session limit without a hacked driver. Hacked drivers are easy and Nvidia simply has better hardware and driver engineers than AMD at this point. Hevc was fine according to EposVox and it was a subset of h.264 that was causing issues with transcoding.

See nVidia Hardware Transcoding Calculator for Plex Estimates for a useful guide.

Also bear in mind that the NVenc encoder is capable of a shit ton of fps total per codec.
Multiple Sessions just subdivides that, you don’t get more performance out of increasing the threads/sessions. I also don’t know about AMD, but the NVidia hardware is a seperate chip so you can still do other work on the Card with the only downside being slightly reduced memory bandwidth.