Vulkan Video Now Enabled By Default For Radeon VCN2/VCN3 Hardware On Linux

An exciting merge today for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver with next quarter's Mesa 25.0 is enabling Vulkan Video API support by default for AMD graphics having VCN 2.x and VCN 3.x hardware.

For Video Core Next 2.x/3.x hardware, Mesa's RADV driver is now enabling Vulkan Video support out-of-the-box. This milestone is finally happening thanks to AMD submitting new firmware to the linux-firmware.git repository and these updated firmware bits have all the necessary changes so that the RADV Vulkan Video integration can pass all of the needed Vulkan API Conformance Test Suite (CTS) tests around the video encode/decode handling.

Video Core Next 2.x is found within AMD graphics from the original RDNA "Nav 1x" GPUs through newer AMD Instinct CDNA hardware. Video Core Next 3.x launched with RDNA2 (Navi 2) hardware and is also used by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Raphael, Dragon Range, and other graphics. With the latest RDNA3 graphics for the Radeon RX 7000 series and Phoenix SoCs, Mesa 24.3 already exposes VCN4 Vulkan Video by default thanks to that change back in August. The AMD graphics firmware issues held back the older VCN2/VCN3 default support until now.

This merge is what now enables RADV Vulkan Video support by default across VCN2/VCN3 AMD hardware. Great to see this milestone for better exposing this cross-vendor, multi-platform open video encode/decode API.

Vulkan Video support has been available within the Mesa RADV driver for a long time but disabled by default. Those on a Mesa release without the support by default can activate using the RADV_PERFTEST=video_decode and RADV_PERFTEST=video_encode environment variable overrides but your mileage may vary depending upon the Mesa version and AMDGPU firmware.