Microsoft Adds AV1 Decode Support To Their Mesa D3D12 Driver

Microsoft engineers continue working on improving their Direct3D 12 driver within Mesa for benefiting Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) usage and similar.

Microsoft recently worked on faster "async" VA-API support benefiting not only their driver but faster video acceleration for RadeonSI too, HEVC encode/decode, and a variety of other recent additions to Mesa by their engineers. The latest on the VA-API video acceleration front while running off their D3D12 driver is now supporting AV1 video decoding.

Even Microsoft is interested in AV1 acceleration.

The newest Mesa 22.3 code this week adds AV1 video decode with the D3D12 driver for NV12 and P010 formats. Additionally, the same pull request adds P010 support for HEVC encode/decode, and NV12/RGBX/RGBA/P010 color conversion support in the video processor code. As a result some new VA-API entry points are also exposed, permitting hardware support.

See this merge request if interested in the D3D12 video work going into the open-source Mesa for ultimately benefiting Windows users. All of these recent changes will be part of Mesa 22.3 with its stable release expected around December.