UnityPlugin-AVProVideo VS AMF

I'm not having any issues with the newest driver, 23.2.2, besides certain video players sometimes stuttering a little in VR.

AMD continues to have issues with video acceleration and SteamVR, even after they tried to fix the issue in an older driver version. This probably most widely affects anyone who plays VRChat. This is another: have to stick to an older drive version for something to work properly.

AMD drivers definitely have problems. For example, https://github.com/RenderHeads/UnityPlugin-AVProVideo/issues/1290 which I have experienced personally. Took AMD 7 months to "fix" it, now it doesn't time out the GPU but the video still looks choppy.

VA-API is used to access fixed-function hardware on the GPU to encode/decode various media formats. New software can result in small quality improvements, like we saw in last year's AMF update, but it can only add new formats if said hardware was already on your chip. The RX 6600+ have hardware for AV1 decode only. Users of RDNA1 and older, as well as the 6400/6500 XT, will forever be completely SOL.

This has been a long running discussion over on github and has finally been addressed by both AMD and Meta. You need to run at least 23.2.2 and Oculus V53 Desktop app (currently only in Public Test Channel, but you can enroll in the app).

By the way you can check the progress of this bug performance here: https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/AMF/issues/384

If you had issues on the latest 23.4.1 driver, I recommend going all the way back to 22.2.3 as that's the best driver for Oculus (doesn't enforce bitrate limits, more info https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/AMF/issues/364).

AMD finally acknowledged and fixed the 100Mbps encoder cap bug in 23.2.2. Now, it's up to Meta to update the Oculus desktop app. For those familiar, there have been multiple threads on the internet plaguing the encoder quality and stability for all 3 VR software (AirLink, VD, ALVR), but as of now, it is in the best state.

Meta/Quest VR headsets had even more issues since they depended on hardware video encoding, and for the longest time many had to stick to a certain version for the encoders to even work. AMD's HEVC encoder is still broken on Oculus Link and there was an artificial bitrate cap added as they try to fix the driver.