Vulkan Video News Today

NVIDIA today released their 550.54.14 driver, which is their first production-ready/stable driver version in the R550 series.

Following yesterday's release of VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 in Vulkan 1.3.277 for AV1 video decoding, a Mesa merge request has already been opened for adding the VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 extension to the Radeon Vulkan 'RADV' driver.

As what's likely to be the last Vulkan API spec update before Christmas, Vulkan 1.3.274 was released today with the Vulkan Video encode extensions promoted as well as adding some other new extensions as a nice end-of-year gift.

There's just under one month to go now until the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) returns to A Coruña, Spain for the annual development conference focused on open-source graphics drivers (Mesa), Wayland, and related Linux display/graphics infrastructure although the X.Org Server itself hasn't received much attention in recent years

Mesa 23.1's RADV driver added initial support for Vulkan Video with select video formats while now a set of patches have been merged to Mesa 23.2-devel for making the H.265 (HEVC) decoding more robust.

Eric Engestrom has delivered another on-time release of a Mesa stable point release

For those that prefer waiting to the first point release before shifting to a new Mesa3D quarterly feature release, Mesa 23.1.1 is out today so you can now begin upgrading to this latest set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used on Linux systems and elsewhere.

Mesa 23.1 will likely be released in the next week or two while out today is Mesa 23.1-RC4 to facilitate more last minute testing by Linux gamers and other stakeholders for this set of open-source OpenGL / Vulkan / video acceleration drivers.

Following this week's Mesa 23.1 feature freeze and code branching, Eric Engestrom on Friday night published Mesa 23.1-rc1.

The Mesa 23.1 graphics driver code is now branched that marks an end to this quarter's feature development