DAV1D Experimenting With Vulkan & OpenGL ES GPU Offloading

There isn't any AV1 video decode/encode built into the video engines of today's GPUs, but the DAV1D project CPU-based AV1 decoder is experimenting with offloading some aspects of the process to current generation hardware with OpenGL ES and Vulkan.

There are experimental branches of the dav1d decoder that exploit OpenGL ES and Vulkan for offloading some elements of the decode process to the graphics hardware. At the moment Self-Guided Restoration (SGR) and Constrained Directional. Enhancement Filter (CDEF) is among the functionality implemented for OpenGL ES / Vulkan.

This is potentially good news for allowing today's GPUs to partially assist dav1d in offering better AV1 video decoding than solely being limited to the CPU.

The Vulkan/GLES code isn't mainlined at this stage but can be found via this branch for Vulkan and here for OpenGL with the effort being led by Pablo Stebler. It will be interesting to see where this work leads.