"Another addition to this version is GPU-accelerated decoding for AVC and HEVC, although at the current time, this implementation only works with Intel QSV and NVIDIA NVDEC."
We consider this a high priority. Other things have come up which, at this time, are a higher priority. We do have it on our list of things to do and as I have said previously, it is our genuine hope to get this into VP 17 in a future update.
You are probably right for the 70% (I think that is the statistic that was given) of VP users who do not use an AMD GPU but for those of us who do and need to decode on the time line it is the issue as time is the critical issue for most of us (even Amateurs like me). I appreciate your feed back and look forward to the next upgrade:)
AMD seems to be struggling with a lot of different apps right now. I know when I bought my Radeon 7, GPU acceleration stopped working for certain apps, and those apps had to be updated (sometimes months later) in order to even see the GPU at all. I've heard that other NLEs that do support AMD decode have been struggling with stability and performance, and the Vegas devs have already cited that as their reason for holding it back a bit. I don't know what it is about AMD's setup that makes supporting decode so complex, but I do miss my GeForce now, for reasons that go far beyond Vegas.
There is nothing that works on AMD cards in 16 that does not work in 17, @Reyfox. The performance is identical, and even better, in some cases. The only difference is that a new feature added in Vegas 17, hardware decoding of video on the timeline, is not yet available for AMD cards.