I was wondering, about vce as an encoder, will it be able to encode more efficient in the future, by updating code e.t.c. or it is pretty much a hardwere limitation.
A little of both. AMF is all about the AMF library from Media SDK, once they update the library Jackun can update his code with later and greater things. There will be a point where VCE 1.0 card will be maxed out and optimized.
Hopefully, that will be when we are able to achieve 1080@60fps balanced preset (which is supposed to be able to do up to 1080@80fps).
But yes, to answer your question, at some point hardware encoders will be maxed out. and definitely wont be able to do 4k with VCE 1.0 or 2.0. the VCE that comes with the R9 285 seem like it encodes much faster than its predecessors. this is kind of VCE 2.5 if you will. it promised the ability to push up to 4k streaming, but those are just marketing items at the moment. no one that I know of here currently runs one. My hopes are that they plummet in price and I will get three and crossfire them :D
I’ve read the OP, but I’m not sure about something I’m not willing to read through 56 pages for. It would be really nice if someone could clear this up for me, or even better include it in the OP:
I’m using an i5-2500k (@3.7 GHz and stock cooler) and an AMD 6870 right now, with OBS 32-bit (for webcam support) and x264 encoding. I stream from a video capture card (StarTech pexhdcap) with 1280×720p60.
I’ve tried using Quick Sync, but the encoding efficiency is noticeably worse than x264.
Will this VCE fork have similar encoding efficiency and quality as the x264 encoder?
From my experience, the current build of VCE runs somewhere between superfast and veryfast presets of x264. that being said, a lot of that depends on your bitrate and what you can push with it.
i.e. very fast preset usings x264 720@60 3000 bitrate looks similar to VCE running at 3500 bitrate after tweaks.
EDIT: the difference being that with VCE, my CPU is freed up to run the game instead of trying to stream and having my CPU do all the work.