MESA RADV Vulkan Driver For AMD Radeon GPUs Gets Vulkan Video H.264 & H.265 Encode Support

MESA's open-source RADV Vulkan driver for Radeon GPUs has witnessed the integration of Vulkan video-accelerated encoding, leading to faster video acceleration times on Linux.

The MESA RADV Vulkan driver has seen some tremendous improvements within the last year, whether in the form of the inclusion of RT performance or even several optimizations that have refined the platform to a much larger extent compared to what it previously was. Moreover, MESA has decided to merge yet again another impressive feature, the Vulkan video, with the RADV driver, which has resulted in a boost in video processing applications, specifically in encoding and decoding tasks.

For those unaware, Vulkan Video is a combination of multiple APIs that allows hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding on compatible GPUs. Compared to conventional software acceleration, Vulkan Video is much more high-performing, which is why its debut in RADV means a lot for developers on the AMD platform. It also allows optimization opportunities depending on use cases.

A five-month-old patch by MESA's developer David Airlie, supporting 264/H.265 Vulkan Video encoding has seen its integration in MESA's 24.1 version. Here is what the merge request says:

This adds vulkan video encoding to radv for h264/5 under the vulkan extensions.

To enable vulkan video encode, build mesa with -Dvideo_codecs=h264enc,h265enc then run radv with RADV_PERFTEST=video_encode.

MESA's RADV driver has reached an optimal stage of refinement, positioning itself to be on par with AMD's official driver on Linux. Continuous updates followed by waves of optimizations on RADV have allowed developers and consumers to have a more "free hand" with multiple assets, and MESA's open-source path is catalyzing the whole process.

News Source: Phoronix