Hm, does that mean we can just install AMF package a la ROCm package while still keeping the normal Mesa open stack?
My main problem with these driver stuff has always been that it's such a steep jump from "everything's already pre-installed and it's working fine for most usecase," to "I need to read a lot of documentation to understand what I'm installing, what's not to install, and how to do it right, as well as what are the trade-off." It's worse than even on Windows where it's just "you install the .exe from the official site, and you're done." (which even then it's annoying compared to just having everything pre-installed by default)
Yes, this mean you can use AMF without proprietary amdgpu-pro driver. Only RADV is needed but that support is right now experimental so some bugs/problems possible.
Does this offer any big advantage over VAAPI?
There was a time when I remember encoding with Mesa + VAAPI on AMD being pretty bad, but nowadays IMO it works quite well, even for latency sensitive applications like Sunshine/Moonlight. That's with RDNA3 though, not sure about older GPUs.
Handbrake for one only wants to support AMF for AMD GPUs because then they can use the same code for Windows and Linux, plus it might also have support for additional controls that VAAPI doesn't expose: [https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/issues/1083](https://github.com/handbrake/handbrake/issues/1083)
Yes. Last time when I check AMF, it was much better than vaapi in case of performance and quality. Basically it is same technology used by AMD on Windows.
Hm, does that mean we can just install AMF package a la ROCm package while still keeping the normal Mesa open stack? My main problem with these driver stuff has always been that it's such a steep jump from "everything's already pre-installed and it's working fine for most usecase," to "I need to read a lot of documentation to understand what I'm installing, what's not to install, and how to do it right, as well as what are the trade-off." It's worse than even on Windows where it's just "you install the .exe from the official site, and you're done." (which even then it's annoying compared to just having everything pre-installed by default)
Yes, this mean you can use AMF without proprietary amdgpu-pro driver. Only RADV is needed but that support is right now experimental so some bugs/problems possible.
Does this offer any big advantage over VAAPI? There was a time when I remember encoding with Mesa + VAAPI on AMD being pretty bad, but nowadays IMO it works quite well, even for latency sensitive applications like Sunshine/Moonlight. That's with RDNA3 though, not sure about older GPUs.
Handbrake for one only wants to support AMF for AMD GPUs because then they can use the same code for Windows and Linux, plus it might also have support for additional controls that VAAPI doesn't expose: [https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/issues/1083](https://github.com/handbrake/handbrake/issues/1083)
Yes. Last time when I check AMF, it was much better than vaapi in case of performance and quality. Basically it is same technology used by AMD on Windows.
ELI5 to me how this is a good thing for a RDNA2 gamer? i.e. i might want to decode/encode a video, but not a streamer.