Khronos Blog - The Khronos Group Inc
The Vulkan® Working Group at The Khronos® Group has delivered a series of video decode and encode extensions since 2022 collectively referred to as "Vulkan Video." These extensions integrate hardware-accelerated stream compression and decompression using widely adopted codecs with the full power of Vulkan, enabling developers to seamlessly combine GPU-powered rendering and compute acceleration with video processing in a single highly efficient runtime.
Today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.302, Khronos is proud to announce two new encode extensions. First, the highly anticipated Encode AV1 extension enhances Vulkan Video by adding AV1 encode functionality to complement its existing AV1 decode support. This milestone means that Vulkan Video now provides full decode AND encode acceleration for the H.264, H.265 and AV1 codec standards. Additionally, the new Encode Quantization Map extension introduces advanced encoding features for all supported codecs to Vulkan Video developers for the first time. We are confident these extensions provide the necessary building blocks for your advanced Vulkan Video applications!
The new VK_KHR_video_encode_av1 extension naturally builds upon the existing core Vulkan Video extensions as did the previous H.264 and H.265 encode extensions. This new extension introduces APIs needed to query implementation AV1 encode capabilities, specify AV1 sequence header parameters, specify AV1 per-picture parameters, provide AV1 reference management information, and configure rate control for AV1. In addition, a new video std header is introduced specifically for AV1 encoding: vk_video/vulkan_video_codec_av1std_encode.h. Together with the existing vk_video/vulkan_video_codec_av1std.h header released with the Decode AV1 extension, developers have access to the AV1 codec parameters needed for configuring the AV1 encode session and operations.
