Intel, NVIDIA To Support Google's VP9 Codec

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel, NVIDIA To Support Google's VP9 Codec

Ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week in Las Vegas, Google has managed to rope in a large number of hardware vendors ranging from ARM to NVIDIA that will be begin supporting VP9 hardware acceleration in Google's push for VP9 to dominate the Ultra HD / 4K space...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTU1ODk

[hajj_3]

I was hoping that AMD kaveri would have a h265 and vp9 hardware asic decoder but there has been no info about this and those chips launch in 1.5 weeks so i'm guessing we won't be getting either of those.

[Figueiredo]

Well, the article does not elaborate on what "begin supporting VP9 hardware acceleration" actually means. Does it mean that intel/nvidia will be able to support the format by updating the drivers or will they need to incorporate said support on the the next chip designs? I suppose its just a commitment to eventually support it and the support for each IHV will depend on how flexible is the decoding block and the economic involved in updating the drivers. In this sense, if the hardware is capable, the chips with better open drivers and documented hardware (intel/amd) will certainly have a higher chance of getting support through driver updates, at least in linuxland...

[treba]

does anybody know what happened with the vp8 gallium state tracker?

[OneTimeShot]

does anybody know what happened with the vp8 gallium state tracker?

I don't know specifically about the VP8 tracker, but the general "video decode using shaders" tracker for H264 turned out to not provide much performance benefit (IIRC) and was obsoleted by "real" video decoder hardware support on pretty much every relevant platform. I think FFMPEG and other systems have some GL acceleration features, but I don't know how much this buys you in practice.

Using full hardware decode has the additional benefit that any patent problems becomes a non-FOSS problem.

[Kivada]

I was hoping that AMD kaveri would have a h265 and vp9 hardware asic decoder but there has been no info about this and those chips launch in 1.5 weeks so i'm guessing we won't be getting either of those.

IIRC it's DSP can handle it, support is just a software update away.

[mark45]

If both Intel and Nvidia put VP9 support in silicon then AMD will be forced to do the same, later.

My next video card has to support both VP9 and h265, so it looks like it won't be AMD.

[funtastic]

Mmm, I don't know where the author got from that vp9 offers better compression than h.264. All the tests I've seen say otherwise.

[profoundWHALE]

VP9 most definitely has better compression than h.264 but won't have better performance for quite a bit.

[OneTimeShot]

Mmm, I don't know where the author got from that vp9 offers better compression than h.264. All the tests I've seen say otherwise.

I think you mean H265 (the new one). IMO we are on diminishing returns in the "getting better compression" stakes - Theora was "good enough for me". It's a bit like choosing between cars with top speeds of 120 and 160 mph - not really important for someone who goes to work at peak time.