AV1 VA-API Acceleration Coming For AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series Linux Users

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AV1 VA-API Acceleration Coming For AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series Linux Users

With AMD RDNA2 GPUs such as the Radeon RX 6000 series there is hardware support for AV1 decoding while the Linux support has been slow to materialize. Fortunately, that's now changing...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AV1-VA-API-Mesa-Radeon

[tehehe]

Software decoding is useless for average person - cpu are way more power hungry than dedicated ASICs.

[intelfx]

your point only counts for laptops/notebooks/tablet computers... but for desktop/workstation who cares if the cpu has 30% utilisation or even 80% ?

https://xkcd.com/619/

Yes, and laptops/notebooks/tablet computers account for "only" the vast majority of personal computing devices. Desktops and workstations are an absolute minority.

[tildearrow]

well yes in modern time linux people are rare and also desktop and workstation people become an extinct race/breed...
Mobile-computer devices are everywhere yes... but you also have to admit 4K@60FPS with ultra high rate of bitrate is the worst case
most mobile devices are at 1K or 2K resolution and the most highend phones are at 2,5K... also most movie material will be 30FPS or even only 24FPS---
yes you want hardware decode of AV1... for mobile devices but many will run 480p 0,5K 1K 2K 2,5K @24/30FPS without problem...
it will suck the battery hard but who cares...

I am who. I care.

Any improvement to battery life is welcome. An example is 2 hours of AV1 in software vs. 10 hours of AV1 in hardware.

This mentality is what led to the Librem 5 having a difficult launch. Battery life was abysmal (1-2 hours IDLE! and it did not improve too much yet) and multiple batches had to be issued, with each batch being more expensive than the other.

[middy]

Software decoding is useless for average person - cpu are way more power hungry than dedicated ASICs.

well on linux, my 6900xt can't do 4k 60fps video without super bad lag. at least with mpv with hwdec enabled with va-api. software with my 5800x can do 8k 30fps with no problem and top off around 80% usage. though on windows my 6900xt can do 4k 60fps just fine with mpv = d3d11-feature-level=12_1. so its not useless when the asic decoding is bad.

[Quackdoc]

any av1 improvement makes me happy. Dav1d works wonders on my phone and my laptop. It is my main content consumption now.

[Alexmitter]

I am who. I care.

Any improvement to battery life is welcome. An example is 2 hours of AV1 in software vs. 10 hours of AV1 in hardware.

This mentality is what led to the Librem 5 having a difficult launch. Battery life was abysmal (1-2 hours IDLE! and it did not improve too much yet) and multiple batches had to be issued, with each batch being more expensive than the other.

I have a hard time understanding what hardware accelerated rendering has to do with the Librem 5's battery runtime.
The "mentality" that lead to its "abysmal" battery time is that they did not want to go the Pinephone rout of suspending the system to ram when its in idle, going the hard way of piece by piece optimizing the kernel while mainlining the kernel support for that SoC. The Pinephone has about 3 Hours suspend time without suspend to ram. The Librem 5 already has around 10-14 hours.

You could join your tribes mobile version, they need some help optimizing too

[bug77]

I just realized the newly released 5000G CPUs are still on Vega. No accelerated AV1 there

[leo_sk]

well yes in modern time linux people are rare and also desktop and workstation people become an extinct race/breed...
Mobile-computer devices are everywhere yes... but you also have to admit 4K@60FPS with ultra high rate of bitrate is the worst case
most mobile devices are at 1K or 2K resolution and the most highend phones are at 2,5K... also most movie material will be 30FPS or even only 24FPS---
yes you want hardware decode of AV1... for mobile devices but many will run 480p 0,5K 1K 2K 2,5K @24/30FPS without problem...
it will suck the battery hard but who cares...

On a windows laptop with nightly, av1 video at 1080p 30fps was using 80-90% cpu. Lagging everything and reduced battery life to under an hour while its usually 4-5 hrs. Hardware was not old, 10th gen quad core intel i5. Disabling av1 resloved the issue. So yeah, i won't be using software decode on my mobile devices, or even production machines

[rene]

nice, just in time for my RX6700xt ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv4-_a_3BKg