Microsoft Officially Launches D3D12 GPU Video Acceleration For WSL Linux Use

For over a year I have been writing about how Microsoft has been working on Direct3D video acceleration for Mesa, getting VA-API mapped atop Direct3D 12 video APIs, video engine based effects, and other enablement around Direct3D 12 video support. Microsoft has today officially released the Direct3D 12 GPU video acceleration support now for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users.

Following Microsoft's engineering work to allow GPU acceleration with OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan APIs under Linux with WSL, they are now ready with official video acceleration support. This work that has been built up within Mesa to support targeting Direct3D 12 allows for Linux native multimedia applications like GStreamer that target to VA-API to run under Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 while enjoying GPU-accelerated video encode/decode.

Microsoft used a video of Satya Nadella to showcase an MP4 video running on GStreamer under WSL with GPU acceleration.

This support paired with the latest Microsoft Windows WSL updates requires Mesa 22.2~22.3 depending upon the particular VA-API features. But long story short if running a very up-to-date stack you can now enjoy accelerated video encode/decoder under WSL that is in turn running atop Direct3D 12 drivers on the Windows host for GPU acceleration. The VA-API integration has been tested by Microsoft with the likes of FFmpeg, GStreamer, and other prominent software and video test samples.

More details from Microsoft engineer Sil Vilerino on the Windows Command Line Blog with today's official announcement.