Merged overnight to Mesa 25.3 is an improvement for the Intel driver’s Vulkan Video encode/decode handling that has been in the works the past few months.
Calder Young reworked the Intel ANV Vulkan driver and the ISL code to layered surfaces for Vulkan Video encoding and decoding. Calder explained in the merge:
“I came up with a surface layout to support using layered surfaces (array textures) for Vulkan video encoding and decoding. You can do this by abusing the row and array pitch of each surface to align the individual slices to tile boundaries at offsets addressable to the media engine. You can also take the planes from a multi-planar texture and increase the array pitch to be the total combined length of each surfaces’s slice, and then interleave the arrays of slices by making the surfaces occupy offset overlapping memory ranges to make each chroma plane addressable relative to each gamma plane. It should theoretically work on all hardware since GFX 8.”
For end users what is important is that it fixes a lot of Vulkan Video decode tests as part of the dEQP tests. With the newest Intel Battlemage GPUs is at least a much better pass rate for withstanding various Vulkan Video decode tests. But for Vulkan Video encoding, Calder is still facing hangs that pre-date this merge.
See this merge for all the details on the Intel Vulkan driver on Linux now using layered surfaces for video encode/decode.
