H.264 Encoding On Skylake Gets A Big Performance Boost

Patches have emerged for being able to take advantage of Intel's low-power/high-performance H.264 encoder on Linux via VA-API.

Skylake features a dedicated "VDENC" video encoder engine for doing low-power encodings but up to now the open-source Intel VA-API driver hasn't supported the VDENC engine. Patches are now out there for enabling said support in libva and the vaapi-intel-driver. Patches were also published so this support can be utilized by GStreamer.

In terms of the performance impact, Sreerenj Balachandran of Intel OTC commented, "My initial test cases showing ~40-50% faster encoding. This will really boost the live encoding use cases." Sreerenj also reiterated in an email to Phoronix, "This will be a huge boost for live encoding scenarios."

More details on this Skylake VDENC support for VA-API can be found via this BugZilla thread.