NVIDIA Beta Driver Update Revises Vulkan Video Support
Vulkan's video encode/decode extensions sadly haven't garnered too much adoption and user attention yet, but it's nice to see NVIDIA continuing to keep up with implementing the latest revisions of these provisional extensions.
Back in April 2021 the Vulkan Video extensions arrived in provisional form as a new industry-standard video encode/decode interface. NVIDIA provided immediate beta driver support for these new extensions even though they continue supporting their well-supported NVENC/NVDEC interfaces as well as VDPAU. Since then they have continued revising the support even with some Vulkan driver vendors not yet exposing the Vulkan Video extensions, including some of the open-source drivers.
With Tuesday's NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver update for Windows and Linux they have moved to supporting the latest versions of the KHR_video_queue, KHR_video_decode_queue, KHR_video_encode_queue, EXT_video_decode_h264, EXT_video_decode_h265, and EXT_video_encode_h264 extensions. These updated provisional extensions are not backwards compatible with the older versions of the extensions. It's nice to see the updates while separately it's also still unfortunate the Vulkan working group has yet to publish new extensions around VP9 and AV1 video encode/decode.
The new NVIDIA Vulkan driver binaries also now expose EXT_mutable_descriptor_type and EXT_depth_clamp_zero_one extensions. There are also fixes around multi-threaded pipeline creation stalls and support for image load/store/atomics with linear images.
Downloads and more details on the NVIDIA Vulkan beta page.
And here's to hoping that the Vulkan Video adoption by drivers and multimedia software takes off sooner rather than later...
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