AMD "EFC" Support Added To Mesa 22.1 For Radeon GPUs With VCN 2.0

For AMD Navi "RDNA1" GPUs and newer having at least Video Core Next 2.0 (VCN2) for the video coding block, a new feature was merged today into Mesa 22.1-devel for the open-source AMD video acceleration stack.

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with GPUs featuring VCN 2.0+ now have Encoder Format Conversion (EFC) support. The Encoder Format Conversion allows for the video encoder to directly read RGB surfaces and therefore bypasses the need for shader-based color conversion for RGB to YUV.

This Encoder Format Conversion should allow for more efficient video encoding with recent AMD GPUs making use of the Gallium3D video acceleration code. The EFC support is enabled by default for supported hardware with the new Mesa 22.1-devel driver code but there is a "noefc" debug option if wanting to disable it for comparison purposes.

The Gallium3D video acceleration (VA) front-end code and the RadeonSI bits were merged today for this AMD Encoder Format Conversion support but aside from this open-source patch activity I haven't been able to find any other AMD documentation on this VCN2 feature.