While Vulkan Video is a cross-vendor, cross-platform video encode and decode API that is beginning to gain traction by multimedia applications and frameworks, the Intel “ANV” open-source Vulkan driver has for now taken a step-back on its encode support with newer hardware. Newer Intel graphics hardware is seeing Vulkan Video encode support disabled due to insufficient testing.
For nearly three years there has been initial Vulkan Video support that over time has picked up encode and decode support for additional video codecs and other improvements. Much of that Vulkan Video work for the Intel ANV driver though has come from contributions outside of Intel but thanks to Red Hat’s David Airlie, Igalia, and other community open-source developers interested in advancing Vulkan Video. Intel for their part has remained largely focused on the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) that also ties into their oneVPL story and the like.
The setback today is Intel Vulkan Video encode being disabled now for Intel Gen12.5 graphics hardware and newer. This means that for now Intel Arc Alchemist and Battlemage graphics cards plus Meteor Lake and newer integrated graphics will no longer have Vulkan Video encode exposed with the latest ANV driver code in Mesa.
This stems from a month old bug report over H.264 Vulkan Video encoding with FFmpeg running into a video conversion failure. Hyunjun Ko of Igalia who has worked on some of the Mesa Vulkan Video code noted it appeared to be due to newer Intel hardware that he doesn’t have while his Alder Lake testing was working out fine. There Intel engineers commented that without those involved developers being able to test the Vulkan Video support on the newer hardware, it’s better to disable it for now.
Thus this merge today to Mesa disables the Vulkan Video encode support across those newer generations of Intel graphics hardware. The patch is also marked for back-porting to the current Mesa stable series too for disabling Vulkan Video on the newer hardware. At least Vulkan Video decode support is remaining enabled on the newer graphics hardware.
If Intel Linux graphics driver engineers aren’t going to commit to improving the Vulkan Video support, hopefully they can at least see the open-source developers like at Igalia have some newer Intel hardware access for testing and addressing the issues.
