An Introduction to Vulkan Video Acceleration Extensions

[JeGX]

n early 2018 the Vulkan Working Group at Khronos started to explore how to seamlessly integrate hardware accelerated video compression and decompression into the Vulkan API. Today, Khronos is releasing a set of Provisional Vulkan Video acceleration extensions : 'Vulkan Video'. This blog will give you an overview of Vulkan's new video processing capabilities and we welcome feedback before the extensions are finalized so that they may provide effective acceleration for your video applications!

Vulkan Video adheres to the Vulkan philosophy of providing flexible, fine-grained control over video processing scheduling, synchronization, and memory utilization to the application. Leveraging the existing Vulkan framework enables efficient, low-latency, low-overhead use of processing resources, including distributing stream processing tasks across multiple CPU cores and video codec hardware—all with application portability across multiple platforms and devices ranging from small embedded devices to high performance servers.

Links:
- An Introduction to Vulkan Video @ Khronos
- Vulkan API specifications 1.2.175 released