Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics Have AV1 Accelerated Decode - Linux Support Lands

On top of Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics bringing other media engine improvements and much better 3D graphics support, another exciting element of the next-generation Intel graphics is now confirmed: GPU-accelerated AV1 video decoding!

There has been talk of Gen12/Xe supporting AV1 at least on the decode side but a lack of hard information to date. But landing this week in Intel's Media Driver for Linux is indeed AV1 decode wired up for Gen12. This is nice to see happen and a bit of a surprise as so far the Intel Media Driver support matrix has lacked any references to AV1.

With some 33k lines of new code, hardware AV1 decode acceleration is in place for Intel Gen12 graphics.

This AV1 decode for the likes of Tiger Lake / Rocket Lake / Xe DG1 will be part of the Intel Media Driver 20.3 release for Linux users. Besides a few SoCs with AV1 hardware encode and decode capabilities, Gen12 could be the first desktop graphics hardware to market bringing AV1 decode to the masses. The Intel Media Driver code right now provides no indications of Gen12 supporting AV1 encode, but at least there is the speedy Intel SVT-AV1 encoder on the CPU side.