Radeon VCN Encode Support For RadeonSI Gallium3D

Earlier this year patches were posted and merged for VCN video decode support with RadeonSI/Gallium3D while now patches are coming from AMD for wiring up VCN video encoding support.

VCN is a new media block with the upcoming Raven Ridge (Zen+Vega) APUs for both video encode and decode. In the past there was UVD for video decoding and VCE for video encoding while now VCN offers both multimedia encode/decode unified functionality via this new implementation. As mentioned, the VCN video decode bits are already in Mesa while the video encode pieces are now under review.

The 18 patches posted today by AMD's Boyuan Zhang can be found on Mesa-dev and will presumably land in time for Mesa 18.0 albeit a bit later than anyone buying Raven Ridge laptops when they begin to appear in shops at the end of this year and early next year. But thankfully the video decode piece is the most important for a majority of users and that can already be found readied.

VCN appears short for "Video Core Next" and supports encoding of MPEG-4 AVC and HEVC but sadly no VP9. But does support decoding of MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC1, MPEG-4 AVC, H.265 HEVC, and VP9, at least based upon the X.Org documentation.

On the desktop side, VCN video encode/decode should begin with next year's Navi hardware with current Vega GPUs still relying upon UVD/VCE.