Video Coding Engine

Video Code Engine (VCE, was earlier referred to as Video Coding Engine, Video Compression Engine or Video Codec Engine in official AMD documentation) 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 except Oland.
Video Coding Engine was introduced with the Radeon HD 7000 Series on . VCE occupies a considerable amount of the die surface and is not to be confused with AMD's Unified Video Decoder (UVD).
As of Raven Ridge (released January 2018), VCE has been succeeded by VCN.
Overview.
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 Code 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 a separately accessible Video Codec Engine, it 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).
VCE 1.0.
As of April 2014, there are two versions of VCE. Version 1.0 supports H.264 YUV420 (I & P frames), H.264 SVC Temporal Encode VCE, and "Display Encode Mode" (DEM).
It can be found on: 
VCE 2.0.
Compared to the first version, VCE 2.0 adds H.264 YUV444 (I-Frames), B-frames for H.264 YUV420, and improvements to the DEM (Display Encode Mode), which results in a better encoding quality.
It can be found on:
VCE 3.0.
Video Code Engine 3.0 (VCE 3.0) technology features a new high-quality video scaling and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265).
It, together with UVD 6.0, can be found on 3rd generation of Graphics Core Next (GCN3) with "Tonga", "Fiji", "Iceland", and "Carrizo" (VCE 3.1) based graphics controller hardware, which is now used AMD Radeon Rx 300 Series (Pirate Islands GPU family) and VCE 3.4 by actual AMD Radeon Rx 400 Series and AMD Radeon 500 Series (both Polaris GPU family).
VCE 4.0.
The Video Code Engine 4.0 encoder and UVD 7.0 decoder are included in the Vega-based GPUs.
VCE 4.1.
AMD's Vega20 GPU, present in the Instinct Mi50, Instinct Mi60 and Radeon VII cards, include VCE 4.1 and two UVD 7.2 instances.
Operating system support.
The VCE SIP core needs to be supported by the device driver. The device driver provides one or multiple interfaces, e. g. OpenMAX IL. One of these interfaces is then used by end-user software, like GStreamer or HandBrake (HandBrake rejected VCE support in December 2016, but added it in December 2018), to access the VCE hardware and make use of it.
AMD's proprietary device driver AMD Catalyst is available for multiple operating systems and support for VCE has been added to it. Additionally, a free device driver is available. This driver also supports the VCE hardware.
Windows.
The software "MediaShow Espresso Video Transcoding" seems to utilize VCE and UVD to the fullest extent possible.
XSplit Broadcaster supports VCE from version 1.3.
Open Broadcaster Software (OBS Studio) supports VCE for recording and streaming. The original Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) requires a fork build in order to enable VCE.
AMD Radeon Software supports VCE with built in game capture ("Radeon ReLive") and use AMD AMF/VCE on APU or Radeon Graphics card to reduce FPS drop when capturing game or video content.
HandBrake added Video Coding Engine support in version 1.2.0 in December 2018.
Successor.
The VCE was succeeded by AMD Video Core Next in the Raven Ridge series of APUs released in October 2017. The VCN combines both encode (VCE) and decode (UVD).