This is a tricky one in my opinion, but i'll document it here if AMD wants to improve their AMF/VCE encoder that is plagued by this issue since the begining:
The issue: The AMF encoder isn't prioritised (enough) when the GPU load is reaching near maximum capacity resulting in dropped frame during the encoding process no matter the settings or codec you're using.
This behavior is "normal" since GPU ressources are also used for encoding, VCE isn't totally independent.
The problem is noticeable if you record a video with high bitrate during a demanding game that reaches 80% + GPU useage.
And especially if you're using streaming software like OBS or Sunshine/Steam in-home streaming.
The idea would be to give top priority or allocate dedicated GPU ressources to the AMF encoder in order to avoid these frame drops.
This could be done at driver level or AMF API level used by 3rd party applications like Sunshine or OBS with a dedicated option.
Known workarounds to this:
- You can already achieve somewhat similar results using Special K ability to lower the renderer priority of the game (to Low or Idle), but this isn't a perfect solution and still has issues.
- You can of course cap the framerate of the game, but unless you totally butcher the framerate that's not a silver bullet and you can reach high CPU useage in some instance too and defeats VRR purpose as well.
Some thought for improvements here, the green team doesn't have this issue: either they figured this or their encoder engine is more independent to the rest of the GPU. This has been headache inducing to me every time i'm streaming or recording with an AMD card.
