Intel Media Driver Adding Vulkan Video Acceleration Support

While Intel has long supported GPU-based video decode acceleration on Linux using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) and more recently via oneVPL under their oneAPI umbrella, with their Intel Media Driver stack they have begun offering support for video decoding using the cross-platform video acceleration extensions to the Vulkan API.

Back in April of 2021 the initial Vulkan Video API extensions were proposedfor both video encode and decode across Windows and Linux. The extensions remain in provisional form but will hopefully be firmed up soon. Notably missing still is VP9 and AV1 extensions for video encode/decode.

Over the past week, the Intel Media Driver open-source software has begun seeing commits for enabling Vulkan decode support.

Last week was initial HEVC decode using Vulkan that was "passing all [the conformance test suite tests]." And then just before the weekend there was Vulkan HEVC and AVC decode implemented and verified to be working correctly for Tiger Lake (TGLLP / Gen12) graphics.

It's great seeing this coming and hopefully will lead to more industry support for Vulkan Video. Back when the provisional specs were published, NVIDIA published a Vulkan beta driver supporting the extensions but has been slow to pick up support elsewhere. David Airlie and others have slowly been working on Vulkan Video for Intel and AMD Radeon graphics with Mesa. So it's possible we'll see Vulkan Video implementations both from Intel Media Driver and via the Mesa-based stack as well. Hopefully as well the VP9 and AV1 Vulkan extensions will be out before long.