NVIDIA First To Offer Driver Support For New Vulkan H.265 & H.264 Video Encode Extensions

Khronos Group has finalized the Video Encode extensions for Vulkan with H.265 & H.264 support & NVIDIA is the first to release driver support.

With the new Vulkan Video Extensions, Khronos Group promises to deliver a standardized, low-overhead, seamless, and highly controllable way to produce H.265 & H.264 video through the use of the latest hardware accelerators from leading GPU players such as AMD, Intel & NVIDIA. These additions were long overdue for the Vulkan ecosystem and we are glad that they are finally here.

Being a cross-platform GPU API, the latest Vulkan Video extensions to support H.265 & H.264 will be available and supported by the three major IHVs. NVIDIA is already out with its first driver release (BETA) for both Windows and Linux platforms whereas support from AMD & Intel is expected to come soon.

NVIDIA, Intel & AMD are the first IHVs implementing support for these extensions:

via Khronos Group

You can grab the latest Vulkan drivers from NVIDIA's official webpage here. The release notes are as follows:

The latest Vulkan 1.3 specification can be found here: https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/

NVIDIA provides full Vulkan 1.3 support and functionality on NVIDIA GeForce and Quadro graphics card with one of the following Ada Lovelace, Ampere, Turing, Volta, Pascal and Maxwell (first and second generation) based GPUs.

December 19th, 2023 - Windows 538.09, Linux 535.43.22

via NVIDIA

Besides the official driver support, open-source drivers such as AMD RADV & ANV are also adding support for the newly released Vulkan Video Extensions which is great for the open-source MESA community. The Open-source drivers already support Vulkan Video decode extensions and will be getting Vulkan video encode extensions too with the latest update.