Chinese GPU Vendor Moore Threads Contributing To VA-API, FFmpeg

Moore Threads was established in 2020 to create domestic GPU solutions in China with their first products having been announced last year. Most of the talk around Moore Threads "MThreads" GPUs have been for Windows but they are working on Linux support to at least some extent.

I was a bit surprised to see recent commits to the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) library and this weekend to FFmpeg by a Moore Threads engineer.

Moore Threads had added VAProfileH264High10 to VA-API for High 10 Profile support for H.264 to this library. In there the Moore Threads engineer commented:

"I'm now working for Moore Threads. Moore Threads (short for Mthreads) is a Chinese GPU manufacturer. Our newest products, MTTS80/MTTS2000/MTT3000, all has H264High10 enc/dec capabilities at max 8k resolution.

Beside H264High10, our [products] also support AVS+ and AVS2 video decoding that are now all out of VAAPI definition. And we also wish to add them to VAAPI."

Now hitting FFmpeg Git this weekend was the VAProfileH264High10 encoding and decoding.

It's nice to see these little contributions so far from Moore Threads but sadly so far we have not seen any open-source GPU DRM kernel driver or Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers published yet for these Chinese graphics cards. We'll see if any proposed open-source solution comes out with time or if they will just be supported as a proprietay driver. Last year it was nice they did publish a Linux driver binary for those interested, but was just that as binary blobs and targeting just one Ubuntu release.