Intel Open-Source Vulkan Driver Merges Initial AV1 Decode Support

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

It has come to the point that, should I buy Intel or AMD GPU now If I mainly use Linux? Seems like AMD catches up with Intel in Linux's video, while Intel's gaming is not too bad at all now. And they also expand their video capabilities further.

AMD has better Linux drivers for gaming. Intel has better GPU compute support. SR-IOV is also possible with Xe based iGPUs, but it isn't all upstreamed yet so I wouldn't let that be the deciding factor. Basically, it depends what is most important to you.

[the-burrito-triangle]

AMD has better Linux drivers for gaming. Intel has better GPU compute support. SR-IOV is also possible with Xe based iGPUs, but it isn't all upstreamed yet so I wouldn't let that be the deciding factor. Basically, it depends what is most important to you.

Intel also has better video decoding and encoding support than AMD. As for SR-IOV, it's Alder Lake and up iGPUs (desktop dGPUs are not supported). Intel does not support SR-IOV on RKL or TGL systems, despite having Xe iGPUs (I own both a Tiger Lake laptop and Rocket Lake workstation and am very sad about this).

Unfortunately, Intel has terrible Vulkan performance compared to AMD, and especially for their iGPUs. OpenGL on Intel is fantastic though. I can play older games at 4k/60fps with my iGPU no problem when using OpenGL (or 20fps with Vulkan using the same settings). AMD has had all sorts of weird driver issues though: zeroing VRAM causing stuttering on Linux, shipping broken GPU FW packages on Fedora 39, Windows 10 crashing during driver update, etc. I use a dual GPU setup (Intel iGPU with headless AMD dGPU) and this gives the best of both worlds. Linux makes using each GPU for different tasks a breeze.

In general, I think Nvidia has the all-round better cards, but NVK isn't up to snuff yet. Maybe in a year or two that will change. It's really a dice roll with any of the big three on Linux.

[hyperchaotic]

I suspect I'm about to structure this question incorrectly, however I am still curious:

With the proliferation of hardware decoding engines, why would anybody want avoid the decode engine and choose to decode using the GPU/shaders/vulkan where it is supported?

For example, if you have an Arc or a Battlemage, why use Vulkan instead of the decoder portion of the chip?

Nobody wants to avoid it if the codec is supported, Vulkan Video implementations can and does still use dedicated HW decoders.

[Daktyl198]

Every time I see something like vulkan getting some feature I just think that it's great because there's even less of a reason to use anything Directx adjacent.

macOS ran away from Khronos for a reason. Vulkan is just turning into another OpenGL, albeit one that's slightly more useful because it's lower level. Every addition to it's spec makes the developer experience worse, and it'll fade into obscurity on non-Linux platforms just like OpenGL did. DirectX will always be used first on Windows platforms because it caters to developers. That's why it already has double the games released that Vulkan does.

[Quackdoc]

Libplacebo with vulkan hwdec is way more efficient then without it. This is rather major for folks using mpv and the libplacebo filter in ffmpeg if you need to decode av1 (vaapi to vulkan has some perf hit). This can actually wind up being the difference between resolution steps in some cases.

[Gamer1227]

Well, as far as GPU video decoding goes... I don't see this being very power efficient on Intel parts: 1) Intel has terrible Vulkan performance (while OpenGL perf. is fantastic). 2) Intel has a hardware video decoding engine on die. Considering points 1) and 2), the native HW decoding is going to be more performant. Now, if there is a CODEC *not* supported by the HW decode engine, then great; let's do this Vulkan stuff. But Xe first gen GPUs already support VAProfileAV1Profile0, so unless this AV1 Vulkan decoding adds support for more profiles, it really is a waste of effort.

Vulkan video uses the HW decoders in the GPU, it is just a API to use those decoders in a vendor-agnostic way.

People should search for 5 minutes on Google before thrwoing guesses.