In addition to this week’s updated Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime, Intel’s software engineers also released their new quarterly version of the Intel Media Driver that provides Video Acceleration API (VA-API) support for integrated graphics hardware going back to Broadwell processors and through the next-gen Panther Lake processors.
With this week’s Intel Media Driver 2025Q1 release they continue supporting back through Broadwell but much of their focus is on current-gen Battlemage and Lunar Lake hardware as well as the experimental support for Panther Lake. The Intel Media Driver 2025Q1 release is the first time they are advertising their “experimental” support for Panther Lake processors with the Core Ultra Series 3 hardware expected later in 2025.
The 2025Q1 release for Panther Lake has upstreamed its VP9 encoding and decoding support. In addition the HEVC decoding code has been fixed up to address a hang observed with early Panther Lake test hardware.
In addition to the enablement work around Panther Lake video acceleration, the Intel Media Driver 2025Q1 release has enabled ARGB support for AV1 encoding on Meteor Lake SoCs. There is also a fix for a heap corruption problem on aging Tiger Lake hardware. Plus various other fixes.
The Intel Media Driver 2025Q1 release can be downloaded from GitHub for those wanting to enjoy the best VA-API encode/decode experience on Linux with Intel hardware.
