RadeonSI Gallium3D Gets Wired For Compute-Only Arcturus To Handle Video Decode

In addition to new patches coming out on Monday for addressing power management with AMD's unreleased "Arcturus" GPU, a set of Mesa patches were merged for adding RadeonSI Gallium3D driver support.

But if you've read our Arcturus posts to date, you know there is no 3D engine enabled for this upcoming GPU. So why is the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver involved? It's there just for bringing up the video decode support, which is present for Arcturus.

As noted earlier this month when digging through the Arcturus AMDGPU kernel driver patches, this compute-focused GPU does have a "VCN 2.5" Video Core Next engine (the successor to UVD/VCE, albeit a newer version than we've seen elsewhere).

The patches that were merged on Monday add the concept to RadeonSI of compute-only chips, confirm the GFX908 target, and implement Arcturus video decode support with the registers differing from other Vega GPUs (or Navi, etc).

This RadeonSI video decode for Arcturus will be found in Mesa 19.2 due out in September, though the kernel bits aren't coming until Linux 5.4 that will be out as stable around November. Granted, enterprise users content with Radeon Software for Linux (Pro) packaged drivers will find the support for launch-day on supported enterprise Linux distributions.