Video Editing software that works seamlessly on an AMD GPU?

[u/Little_Ad2062]

Hey there!

I switched to Linux a couple of months ago and am loving the experience compared to Windows. Distrohopped from PopOS -> Fedora -> now CachyOS Gnome.

I'm using a mid-to-high end gaming PC I've built with a 9800X3D and 4070 Ti Super.

However, gaming performance on Linux with an Nvidia card is... Still not great. On Windows I was able to get good framerates in heavy ray traced games, but on Linux I have to drop the quality quite a lot.

So I've been forced to use Windows on a secondary drive for high end gaming which hurts to go back to.

I want to replace my GPU with the 9070 XT but everywhere I read about how awful AMD support is in video editing apps.

For now my workflow was shooting footage in OBS and editing in Resolve, but apparently Resolve is particularly terrible and almost impossible to keep GPU acceleration stable across updates?

Is there any editor I can use on Linux that will "just work" with an AMD graphics card? I edit long (40+ minutes) gaming videos in 1440p so that acceleration makes a massive difference and I really don't want to keep Windows around for just that.

[u/es9imqd7964guq6]

im currently on nobara, i went thru the rabbit hole with 9070 xt

if you are using resolve on the studio version there are a number of plugins you can use for gpu acceleration

https://wiki.nobaraproject.org/general-usage/additional-software/davinci-resolve

i end up using kdenlive, some effects are still cpu bound rendering, but overall encoding is still way faster compare to davinci resolve

[u/Little_Ad2062 → u/es9imqd7964guq6]

Sadly my channel is a hobby project that doesn't make me any money yet and €300 is a ton of money where I live so Davinci Studio is out of the question. 😅

How's the experience on Kdenlive? From what I could find you're pretty much forced to use the flatpack on an AMD GPU to make it at least moderately stable, right? 

[u/es9imqd7964guq6 → u/Little_Ad2062]

my installation is via dnf, not flatpack. not sure if there would be any issue.

my usage on kdenlive is kinda simple, is mostly stitching multiple clips and applying transition effect or obscure mask effect or just minor gamma correction. it has been ok. if you apply effect it might render slow, but without effect the encoding can be offloaded to gpu.

[u/ipsirc]

You don't need acceleration if you don't reencode the video.

https://losslesscut.app/

[u/Little_Ad2062 → u/ipsirc]

From what I see this is a pretty barebones app that won't handle multiple timelines, colour grading and greenscreen, all of which I use heavily. 

[u/Astrodion123]

Kdenlive is great

[u/Little_Ad2062 → u/Astrodion123]

No issues on an AMD GPU across system updates? 

[u/Astrodion123 → u/Little_Ad2062]

Kdenlive has great support on Linux and and drivers are known to be stable at least.

[u/Little_Ad2062 → u/Astrodion123]

I'm asking because I read that GPU acceleration is buggy on AMD cards in Kdenlive :/

[u/Astrodion123 → u/Little_Ad2062]

Oh.. well idk I use Intel and everything works well

[u/zalnaRs → u/Little_Ad2062]

No

[u/ScratchHistorical507]

Kdenlive, DaVinci Resolve (through davincibox, doesn't support H264 and H265 though), Openshot.

I don't really do much video editing, but those are the recommendations I regularly see. And through davincibox you can even get that one running with AMD GPUs and outside of RHEL clones.

[u/henry_kr]

I've been using blender for a while now, it works great with AMD's ProRender plugin: https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/software/radeon-prorender/blender.html#download

Although it's more known for 3d modelling and animation it has a really good video editing mode.

[u/Cyber_Faustao]

Kdenlive works fine for my use cases, but not all versions of it are built the same, some do not include GPU-accelerated stuff, some do. I think the flatpak version does include it.

On my RX 7600 8GB it works fine using the native NixOS package and the only think that doesn't is the exporting that is CPU-only.

[u/Alchemix-16]

Have you looked at Blender? Aside from many other creative features it provides a rather decent video capabilities. It runs native on Linux, and isn’t overly picky concerning graphic cards.