Intel Media Driver Update Brings Nova Lake S Support, AV1 Improvements
While at the end of February, today Intel released the Intel Media Driver 2025Q4 release as well as the latest VPL GPU Runtime for their media stack.
The 2025Q4 releases to the open-source Intel Media Driver and VPL (nee oneVPL) GPU Runtime are out today. With the Intel Media Driver 2025Q4 release they have upstreamed Nova Lake S support for video decoding and video processing for that next-generation platform. The Intel Media driver continues supporting Intel integrated/discrete graphics hardware back to Broadwell and now through Nova Lake.
The support matrix hasn't yet been updated and the possibility of future patches is still possible, so at this stage we don't know of any guaranteed new media features that could be coming for the media engine with Nova Lake S compared to Arrow Lake or Panther Lake. The Nova Lake S enablement though does confirm that accelerated MPEG2 video decoding is being removed with Nova Lake and newer.
In addition to the Nova Lake S upstreaming, the Intel Media Driver 2025Q4 version does bring an AV1 video decoding fix for Panther Lake X3_LPM platforms. Also on the AV1 side are some AV1 video encode improvements too, such as enabling LUT rounding under CQP on Xe2 for improved image quality.
More details on the Intel Media Driver 2025Q4 release via GitHub.
Also out today is the VPL GPU Runtime 2025Q4 that also has Nova Lake S support as well as some AV1 decode improvements.
The 2025Q4 releases to the open-source Intel Media Driver and VPL (nee oneVPL) GPU Runtime are out today. With the Intel Media Driver 2025Q4 release they have upstreamed Nova Lake S support for video decoding and video processing for that next-generation platform. The Intel Media driver continues supporting Intel integrated/discrete graphics hardware back to Broadwell and now through Nova Lake.
👁 Nova Lake patches for Intel Media Driver
The support matrix hasn't yet been updated and the possibility of future patches is still possible, so at this stage we don't know of any guaranteed new media features that could be coming for the media engine with Nova Lake S compared to Arrow Lake or Panther Lake. The Nova Lake S enablement though does confirm that accelerated MPEG2 video decoding is being removed with Nova Lake and newer.
In addition to the Nova Lake S upstreaming, the Intel Media Driver 2025Q4 version does bring an AV1 video decoding fix for Panther Lake X3_LPM platforms. Also on the AV1 side are some AV1 video encode improvements too, such as enabling LUT rounding under CQP on Xe2 for improved image quality.
More details on the Intel Media Driver 2025Q4 release via GitHub.
Also out today is the VPL GPU Runtime 2025Q4 that also has Nova Lake S support as well as some AV1 decode improvements.