Microsoft Working On Direct3D 12 Video Acceleration For Mesa

Microsoft's latest work in the area of open-source graphics drivers with the Mesa stack is for adding Direct3D 12 video acceleration support.

As part of Microsoft's continued work around supporting GUI applications with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) and mapping Vulkan/OpenGL/OpenCL over Direct3D on Windows, Microsoft engineers are now working on adding Direct3D 12 video acceleration support to Mesa.

Not only are they working to add D3D12 video acceleration to their Gallium3D Direct3D 12 driver, but they are hoping to implement it so that other Mesa video front-ends would be able to work off this D3D12 video acceleration code path. In theory this would allow Mesa's VA-API and VDPAU implementations to be able to run off D3D12 video hardware acceleration in such environments.

Microsoft's D3D12 open-source video driver is currently being worked on via this Gitlab branch.

This Mesa Direct3D 12 video work was brought up by Microsoft on the mailing list due to some open questions around Wayland integration. This code is still in flux and more work ahead before it could be ready for end-users, but interesting nevertheless and yet another push by Microsoft into Mesa.