VCN5 AV1 Encode & More AMD RDNA4 RADV Support Land In Mesa 24.2

It's been another busy week with the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack with continued preparations around enabling support for next-generation RDNA4 graphics (as well as continued RDNA3+ / RDNA 3.5 tuning).

As noted earlier this week, there was a lot of RDNA4 changes for the RadeonSI driver landing. As also previously reported, Valve began pushing more ACO compiler changes for RDNA4/GFX12 to this alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. Since then the code activity has continued in preparing the open-source Linux driver for the next-generation AMD Radeon hardware.

Samuel Pitoiset at Valve landed 33 patches providing the initial GFX12 (RDNA4) support for the RADV Vulkan driver. That was followed by a second round of GFX12 support with 15 more patches working to get the graphics IP support in order for RDNA4 hardware. That too is merged for Mesa 24.2.

Not yet merged but Rhys Perry opened another merge request with more ACO compiler changes for GFX12. Marek Olsak for GFX12 with RadeonSI opened a merge request adding GFX12 delta color compression (DCC) support, fixes, and other clean-ups for the next-gen GPUs. It's been a busy week in the open-source driver world around GFX12.

Outside of the graphics IP block, a merge request this week from AMD got the AV1 video encoding now all squared away for that Video Core Next 5.0 IP.

At this speed, hopefully by the Mesa 24.2 stable release in August will have nice support for these upcoming Radeon graphics cards.