Video Coding Engine

Video Coding Engine (VCE, sometimes incorrectly referred to as Video Codec Engine) is AMD's video encoding ASIC implementing the video codec H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. Since 2012 it is integrated into all of their GPUs and APUs.

Video Coding Engine was introduced with the Radeon HD 7900 on 22 December 2011. VCE occupies a considerable amount of the die surface and is not to be confused with AMD's Unified Video Decoder (UVD).

The handling of video data involves computation of data compression algorithms and possibly of video processing algorithms. As the template shows, lossy video compression algorithms involve the steps: Motion estimation (ME), Discrete cosine transform (DCT), and entropy encoding (EC).

AMD Video Codec Engine (VCE) is a full hardware implementation of the video codec H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. The ASIC is capable of delivering 1080p at 60 frames/sec. Because its entropy encoding block is also separately accessible Video Codec Engine can be operated in two modes: full-fixed mode and hybrid mode.

By employing AMD APP SDK, available for Linux and Microsoft Windows, developers can create hybrid encoders that pair custom motion estimation, inverse discrete cosine transform and motion compensation with the hardware entropy encoding to achieve faster than real-time encoding. In hybrid mode, only the entropy encoding block of the VCE unit is used, while the remaining computation is offloaded to the 3D engine (GCN) of the GPU, so the computing scales with the number of available compute units (CUs).

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