PC Drivers & Software

[AridFall256]

Hello. Around last spring I noticed that the video quality of my streams had become much worse even though I had not changed any settings. Naturally I thought the issue has to be with either OBS update or AMD driver update as I have AVC encoder for my streams. So first I tried older OBS versions which didn't help. Eventually tried to go back to the AMD driver version 23.12.1 which was the last driver version I know that still had good video recording quality. And it helped, streams were looking great again in terms of video quality.

However recently I thought that I can't stay on 23.12.1 forever and decided to update to 24.6.1. Guess what, the quality issue was back and even worse actually. And now with 24.7.1 I decided to do thorough testing to see if changing to CPU encoder would help. However despite trying the CPU (x264) encoder and different encoder settings, nothing changed the fact that the encoded videos would always have a certain kind of messy motion blur mess. In fact I even tried using different software to record samples however even Radeon Adrenaline software and Windows recording feature recordings have the same weird motion blur. Not only that. Also I even tried changing settings in the game I stream to see if that makes a difference because I was using FSR upscaling in the game. Didn't help either.

So to conclude, the issue seems to be related to AMD drivers because recorded video quality is just fine with 23.12.1 drivers. Also using CPU encoder or different recording software doesn't help with the quality issue. The quality issue is weird messy pixelated motion blur that looks really bad.

Does anyone know about this issue and if there is a workaround other than using ages old drivers? If this is not a know issue I hope AMD would look into it and fix it.

Some basic hardware info: (I would just include Dxdiag report as an attachment but that doesn't seem to be possible here)

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
GPU: ASRock Radeon RX 7900 XT Phantom Gaming 20GB OC
RAM: 32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5 (2x16GB)
Storage: Samsung 980 PRO 500GB, Samsung 980 1TB, Seagate FireCuda 510 2TB
Motherboard: MSI MAG X670E TOMAHAWK WIFI
Power supply: Corsair RM750X 750W (2021)

OS: Windows 11 home

[AridFall256]

Update: I was streaming today and aftwards checked the VOD and it was looking actually quite okay. There wasn't much at all of that pixelated blur, not until the very end at least. Within the last about 11 minutes of a 3 hour stream the stream just broke, the whole image became a pixelated blurry mess under motion. This was much worse than the consistent pixel blur earlier when I was testing with offline recordings. I have seen this before as well after I updated to 24.6.1. This why I said in the original post that it seems to have gotten even worse with the newest driver versions. However this issue seems to be bit random with streams at least while it is consistent with offline recordings but not as bad.

[AridFall256]

Update: I found something. The game I stream is EA Sports WRC and I noticed that the worst blur happens with certain car and location combination while driving with in car camera. While driving with outside camera the issue is less bad. On the video 1. the worst case blur can be seen. For comparison on the video number 2. is a clip from a bonnet cam. All the OBS settings are the same in clip 2. as in clip1. This confirmed what I have thought before that this might have something do with colors. So I decided to try changing Direct3D 11 renderer settings in the advanced settings of OBS. Image1 shows the default color settings of OBS. I tried settings to roughly match the color settings of my display. Display settings can be seen in image2 and the new OBS settings in image 3. This actually helped with the recording quality a lot. This can be seen in video 3. All the other video settings are the same in OBS. Now this would be great if the OBS didn't state that all other than NV12 and one other color format are not meant for streaming and other formats would be converted back to those 2 which might cause extra CPU usage. However based on small test this I444 setting helped with stream quality too and I didn't notice significantly higher CPU usage.

Is this how it is supposed to be? NV12 color fomat being a blurry mess when using modern AMD drivers? I am pretty sure that no. Like I said in the original post, with 23.12.1 drivers my stream quality was fine without changing any OBS color rendering settings and also NV12 is supposed to be for streaming. So here is my theory: with newer drivers there is something wrong with the color data of the image rendered by the GPU which in turn causes these issue when video encoders converting into different format.

[AridFall256]

The videos on the previous post don't work. First I assumed it was because they were waiting for approval by moderator but they never became available. Maybe they don't work because they were in mkv format. Then again this site doesn't give a prompt saying anything about mkv not being supported. Anyway for now I am just gonna post still images from the videos to roughly show how they look under basic motion.

Image 1: Original settings with my normal in game camera mode
Original settings with my normal in game camera.

Image 2: Exact same OBS settings as in image one but with different in game camera.

Same settings as in the previous image but with different in game camera

Image 3: Adjusted color settings in OBS, otherwise same settings as in image 1.

Adjusted color settings in OBS

[AridFall256]

Hello. Update on this. CPU (x264) encoder quality has been fixed somewhat and somehow by something. I have no idea what trickered the quality improvement (I mean less broken quality) with x264. The quality still isn't perfect everywhere but x264 is adequate for now. However the AMD AVC encoder quality is still broken as seen in the image 1 of the previous post. What could possibly cause this? Bad drivers or perhaps defective GPU unit on my end or some weird software bug unrelated to GPU drivers? Hard to know anything because there has been no response to this.

[Bumgie]

Since no one has responded I suppose I will. Switching the color format in OBS advanced settings to I444 like you've suggested significantly improved the image quality for me as well - especially in higher motion games. I had similar quality issues to what you've shown in your earlier post and even in less fast paced games, simply a sudden change in the scene would turn the recording/stream garbled for a handful of frames

I'm using a 6600XT with the same color/pixel format (8bpc / RGB 4:4:4 (Full RGB)) setting set in Adrenalin as you have and currently am running the 24.7.1 driver (unsure if 24.8.1 still has this issue (24.8.1 latest driver as of this post))

Switching the color format to I444 under 'Advanced' and using the following settings under 'Output' has drastically improved quality even in high motion scenes (raising the bitrate helps as well):

Preset: Quality

Profile: high

Max B-frames: 2

AMF/FFmpeg Options: MaxNumRefFrames=4 BReferenceEnable=1 MaxConsecutiveBPictures=1 BPicturesPattern=1 HighMotionQualityBoostEnable=1

Can't say if this is a driver bug or not (shouldn't need  to set I444 in OBS afaik) but the above settings adjustments helped drastically. The quality will never be as good as the CPU encoder but having the option to offload to the GPU encoding at times can be useful for recording/streaming heavily CPU bound games

This bug(?) seems to only affect AMF H.264 (AVC) encoding, AMF H.265 (HEVC) is unaffected

[AridFall256]

Hello. Good to know I am not the only one with this issue. I noticed that with OBS and twitch at least the bitrate become much higher than the set video bitrate when the color format is changed to I444 and twitch complains about unstable stream. Looks fine still though but I think this is why using I444 format for streaming is not really viable so I have opted for using x264 since I have enough CPU headroom with the game I play when using FPS cap.

And yes, the issue is still there with 24.8.1 drivers.

[theprobo]

you should make reddit post on r/AMD or r/AMDhelp