Gallium3D VDPAU On Radeon Starts Working

Not all German Linux users and developers were busy the past few days drinking beer and eating Ubuntu pickles and blood sausage, but Christian König has made some more progress in his video playback work for the Radeon Gallium3D driver.

Last year the work began by Christian to get the Gallium3D XvMC state tracker working with the R600g driver. He achieved that with various features, but being Gallium3D-based means its using GPU shaders and not the dedicated Unified Video Decoding (UVD) engine found on modern Radeon HD graphics processors. Still though using shaders is a big performance win for HD video playback compared to pegging the CPU constantly.

With the XvMC Radeon Gallium3D work going well, last month Christian then began working on a VDPAU state tracker for R600 Gallium3D. We've now received reports that this implementation of NVIDIA's Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix is beginning to work for MPEG-2 codec on R600g. In the public there's also various messages on the mailing list about XvMC / VDPAU improvements for this Radeon-focused work.

Only MPEG-2 is the only codec known to work at this time for the VDPAU state tracker, but don't expect it to be bug-free at this point. All of this Mesa / Gallium3D work is also living in a separate Mesa branch and likely won't be merged to master for a mainline Mesa release within the next couple of months.