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⇱ Improved Intel Vulkan Video Code Merged For Mesa 25.3 - Phoronix


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Improved Intel Vulkan Video Code Merged For Mesa 25.3

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 3 September 2025 at 05:57 AM EDT. 1 Comment
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 make use of 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.

👁 Intel Layered Surfaces


See this merge for all the details on the Intel Vulkan driver on Linux now using layered surfaces for video encode/decode.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.