Unified Video Decoder

UVD occupies a considerable amount of the die surface at the time of its introduction[1] and is not to be confused with AMD's Video Coding Engine (VCE).

As of AMD Raven Ridge (released January 2018), UVD and VCE were succeeded by Video Core Next (VCN).

[7] UVD handles VLC/CAVLC/CABAC, frequency transform, pixel prediction and inloop deblocking, but passes the post processing to the shaders.

AMD has also stated that the UVD component being incorporated into the GPU core only occupies 4.7 mm² in area on 65 nm fabrication process node.

The UVD 2 features full bitstream decoding of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, VC-1, as well as iDCT level acceleration of MPEG2 video streams.

[27][28] Starting with the integrated graphics of the Raven Ridge APU (Ryzen 2200/2400G), the former UVD and VCE have been replaced by the new "Video Core Next" (VCN).

[29] [30][29] Most of the Radeon HD 2000 series video cards implement the UVD for hardware decoding of 1080p high definition contents.

The UVD SIP core needs to be supported by the device driver, which provides one or more interfaces such as VDPAU, VAAPI or DXVA.

One of these interfaces is then used by end-user software, for example VLC media player or GStreamer, to access the UVD hardware and make use of it.

[63][64] Since April 2013,[65] UVD is supported by the free and open-source "radeon" device driver through Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU).

On 28 June 2014, Phoronix published some benchmarks on using Unified Video Decoder through the VDPAU interface running MPlayer on Ubuntu 14.04 with version 10.3-testing of Mesa 3D.

Support for running custom FreeRTOS-based firmware on the Radeon HD 2400's UVD core (based on an Xtensa CPU), interfaced with a STM32 ARM-based board via I2C, was attempted as of January 2012.

The UVD was succeeded by AMD Video Core Next in the Raven Ridge series of APUs released in October 2017.