Intel Media VA-API Driver Update Adds EU Fused Dispatch For 8K Video Processing

Yesterday Intel released an updated open-source Media SDK for leveraging media acceleration on their graphics hardware. Along with that out today is the Intel Media Driver 20.4.5 release as their dedicated Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems.

The Intel Media Driver 20.4.5 update is their Q4'2020 update to this open-source VA-API implementation. Like in recent quarters, their focus has been on wiring up more functionality for Gen12 graphics with the likes of Tiger Lake / Rocket Lake / DG1 / SG1 hardware.

Among the Gen12 improvements this quarter is getting VP8 decode working for this latest hardware, HEVC VME P-Frames support, AVC VDEnc TCBRC (Transport Controlled BRC) support, improved synchronization handling, and EU fused dispatch.

The EU fused dispatch support is for handling 8K video processing with the VA-API driver. This fused dispatch support is to overcome 8K video processing limitations otherwise with this latest Intel graphics hardware.

The New Year's Eve release of Intel Media Driver 20.4.5 can be downloaded from GitHub.