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[BryanC]

I'm still running into these odd frame drops every 20 seconds or so on my Ryzen 2500U w/ Vega 8 on 60 MB/s+ 4K content w/ HDR passthrough enabled. Refresh rate switching look good (don't mind the 23.999 vsync in the attached image, it matches the window at 23.976 until I login remotely to take the screenshot) and the GPU is barely chugging (around 40% before I login, see attached). I've tried all dithering options and w/o sigmoidal light. I'm running the December 2021 AMD Radeon drivers on up-to-date Windows 11. I'm using the AMD power profile with all the GPU options on max performance.

Do you think that this could still be a performance bottleneck or an AMD-specific issue? The experience hasn't been too far off from the Vega 3 and this GPU should be about twice as fast. Is the shared memory too slow? Driver bug?

If the Vega 8 is still bottlenecking (I'd be curious to hear from Intel users with integrated GPUs), are there any additional performance improvements that could be made to eliminate these frame drops? If not, I will need to look for different hardware.

Also on a positive note, JRVR (unlike madVR) works around this annoying driver and/or Windows bug that prevents my display from entering full RGB or HDR mode. JRVR just outputs the correct 8-bit or 10-bit signal in full RGB every time. This alone is why I want to use it full-time!

Edit: Progress, I installed Ryzen Controller and pegged the minimum GPU frequency at full-speed and guess what....no frame drops! No frame drops on 60 MB/s content, no frame drops on 100 MB/s+ content. Downside is I eventually start to get frame drops when it starts thermal throttling so I will need to find a sensible middle ground that allows the GPU to cool off without throttling down too much and causing frame skips.

So I think that the problem I'm having on these ULV AMD chips is that JRVR is too efficient and allowing them to go into some lower-power underclocked mode that causes the random frame drops despite plenty of performance overhead.

Interesting note, the R1505G and other embedded Ryzen chips don't support RyzenAdj so the laptop APUs make more sense for HTPC use if Hendrik can't come up with a workaround to keep the GPU in an active state? Maybe the workaround needs to be disabled for maximum power savings on mobile, I don't know.

[Hendrik]

Power Management is an annoying thing sometimes. A game, for example, would render as fast as it can, keeping the GPU busy, and it would know how much it needs to work. But with video, we only render one frame as we need it, and the way its currently setup we also can't properly pre-render more frames to try to have a bit of a buffer to avoid power management related issues. Long term there is some things to investigate with pre-rendering, but its complicated to get right with video timings and not introducing additional overhead.

One option is coming soon to avoid an extra frame copy, which especially on iGPUs can have a performance impact. Would be interesting to see if it does something.

On NVIDIA, you can configure the power management profile on a per-application basis in the official control panel, which often helps these issues. This doesn't force it to run in full power at all times, but just makes it keep higher clocks for longer.
Unfortunately my experience on AMD is limited.

If you can request specific power modes with that application, finding a balanced profile might be worthwhile - not forcing full power, but maybe preventing the lowest power profile.

PS:
Bitrate of content should usually not impact the video renderer ... at all. Only resolution/bitdepth/format/refresh rate should matter. If you consistently see an impact from higher-bitrate files, I wonder if maybe the HW decoder is getting impacted in a similar way. I should add some queue information to the OSD to help see that.

[Manfred]

I am using AMD Ryzen 7 5700G 8C16T with Radeon Graphics since end of November last year using Win11. I had also the impression that sometimes the GPU goes into sleep mode and picture becomes fuzzy and washed out.

I had some changes:
1. In Win 11 Energy Options using Full Power instead of balanced
2. Change Displayport to HDMI then there are only two options instead of four with Display Port: RGB limited and RGB full. I always use 8 bit RGB Full (I have an UW LG Monitor only supporting 8 bit). It's more stable.
3. Disable Radeon Chill(reduces frame rates for power saving)
4. Video Profile: User Defined

Attachment (in german language) shows AMD Graphics Power Configuration in Win11

[BryanC]

I can eliminate frame drops on the lower bitrate files by disabling HA decoding. But I don't know if this is just because it pegs the chip at a higher frequency (using so much CPU to decode) or if it's the culprit. On higher bitrate stuff the software decoding is the bottleneck so it's definitely a requirement on these low-powered chips for it to be enabled.

[Hendrik]

Just to be clear, with hardware decoding it also happens on lower bitrate files?

I wonder if its maybe not too happy that we're using the same D3D device for rendering and decoding (logical software device, not different hardware). From what I gather, madVR for example uses two separate ones. But from a coding perspective sharing is easier, since then you can communicate directly between them. I might try to add a compatibility mode to use separate devices to see if that helps in such cases as yours, unfortunately I never had that particular issue myself on any PC, but then AMD GPUs I only have a few of.

[Hendrik]

I added such an option to JRVR for the next beta build, lets see if it does anything useful. Its a bit experimental, like there is some minimal corruption on seeks, but I didn't want to spend too much time trying to flesh it out if its not beneficial anyway.

You'll find it under Advanced -> Rendering, "Allow sharing D3D11 device with hardware decoder" - default on (the current behavior). I feel like if its supposed to stay, I should probably invert the wording somehow.
But lets figure out if it does something useful first. I've also done some other cleanup, so make sure to confirm with option on and off if you see any changes.

[BryanC]

Excellent, I look forward to trying it out!

The exact type of material that causes the frame drops is a little hard to nail down, but it's usually any UHD remuxes above 80 MB/s or so. There is some 40-60 MB/s content that exhibits it as well but the higher the bitrate the more likely that it will drop frames. I sent you a PM with an example file that I can't get to render without frame drops.

In the meantime I've found that increasing the temperature limit of the APU definitely decreases the frequency of frame drops, even better than pegging the minimum throttle frequency. I also noticed that the memory frequency seemed to throttle whenever I was experiencing frame drops so I pegged that as well. It's a little better now, but there are still some titles that drop frames regardless.

[fitbrit]

Are you using AMD balanced power plan, or high performance, or a custom one?

[BryanC]

Are you using AMD balanced power plan, or high performance, or a custom one?

I am using the AMD balanced plan as the start (the Radeon installer only includes the balanced plan for this chip, apparently) and then tweaking it (disabling PCIe and USB powersaving and setting GPU/CPU to max performance).

[BryanC]

Did some testing last night and it doesn't appear that the new D3D11 device option is helping (or hurting) my random frame drops so apparently the decoder is happy in the shared device and something else is the culprit. Let me know if there's anything more I can do to help. At the moment I just crank up the quality for 1080p and low-bitrate 4K HDR (Lanczos 3 taps, sigmoidal light, blue noise) and then turn it all the way down (bilinear, no sigmoidal light, no dither) for high-bitrate UHD for the least number of frame drops.

[Hendrik]

Oh well, at least its simpler to not need to care for that mode.
There is another option coming soon-ish that might help especially on iGPUs, as it saves some memory bandwidth, which is typically the biggest problem for integrated graphics. But that needs some other work to be done first, so it'll be another week or so.

[BryanC]

It could certainly be a memory thing, as you can see in my screenshot this chip has 1GB of VRAM and whenever MC plays a movie it starts using more of the shared memory too. This would explain why higher bitrate movies exhibit the symptoms more frequently: while it may not affect the renderer it does increase the chance of using shared memory. So if you guys are working out a way to reduce that footprint I think it might be the solution! Unfortunately I don't know if AMD throttling is involved as well, maybe the infinity fabric is involved.

[Manfred]

This is a user report from myself about testing JRVR on my Home Office Workstation with UW QHD Monitor and LG 4K TV compared to my current living room solution with LG 4K TV. Intention was to check if AMD Ryzen 7 iGPU could drive my 4K TV.
    • Home Office Workstation: AMD Ryzen 5700G 8C/16T AM4, 65 W with a CPU Passmark of 24086, Video Passmark of 2708 and a JRMark of 7130 , Win 11.
    • Living Room Media Renderer: i3-6100 3MB 3.7 GHz, 51W with a CPU Passmark of 5483 and EVGA GTX 960 SSC 4GB GDDR5, Video Passmark of 5822 ( Factor 2,1 more GPU Power compared to  Ryzen 7 iGPU) and a JRMark of 4104, Win 10.

Latest MC releases 28.0.98 was used.
MC HW Acceleration: Enabled; Video Clock: Enabled
8 bit color depth was used (MY LG UW monitor only supports 8 bit as well as GTX 960. Everything was set to RGB Full.
I used Custom Display Settings to match the frame rates to the capabilities of the PC Monitor and the 4K OLED TV.

Summary:

    • UWQHD as Target Resolution – Home Office Workstation with AMD  5700G APU
AMD Ryzen 5700G is capable to play any SD, HD, FHD, 4K (no HDR) video content on my Home Office Workstation without dropped frames (Jinc up-scaling, Fast Bicubic down scaling, SupreRes Enhancement: Disabled; Dithering: Blue Noise; Allow Sharing D311 Device with Decoder: Enabled)
    • 4K OLED TV – Media Renderer with i3-GTX 960
With the current release of JRVR I could even play 4K HDR content with HDR passthrough using Jinc Up-scaling without any dropped frames. That was impossible with madVR. A great success of the MC team! All other video content like SD, HD, FHD plays without any problems even its interlaced video content.   GPU utilization is ~20-30% less compared to madVR. CPU is no problem, is always < 5% utilization. 8GB system memory is required.
    • 4K OLED TV –  Home Office Workstation with AMD  5700G APU
AMD  5700G was not capable to play any SD, HD, FHD using Jinc up scaling without dropped frames.
      AMD  5700G was capable to play any SD, HD, FHD using Lanczos up-scaling without dropped frames. 1080i content pushes the GPU to its limit but works.
      AMD  5700G was not capable to play 4K HDR content without dropped frames. If the AMD  5700G is forced to use the System Memory the response times drop massively even if the GPU workload is lower than 90%. CPU is no problem, is always below 10% utilization. 8GB system memory is required.

      Comparing the i3+GTX 960 solution to the AMD APU for playing 4K HDR content with JRVR one sees that the APU has an unbalanced design – the eight cores have nothing to do whereas the iGPU suffices on the memory interface and the iGPU is pushed to its limit. The i3-GTX 960 solution is better balanced has more headroom and plays 4K HDR without dropped frames using 8bit color depth. Newer NVIDIA GPU’s like RTX 3060 also support 10 bit. Using the APU for my Home Office in UW resolution is fine. That's was the goal and why I bought it. Hopefully my 5-8 years old living room solutions run a few years more – it fullfills all my requirements.-)

Attached you find the detailed test results: