News: 0001616376

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Intel Media Driver Update Brings Nova Lake S Support, AV1 Improvements

([Intel] 2 Hours Ago Intel Media Driver 2025Q4)


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.

[1]

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 [2]GitHub .

Also out today is the [3]VPL GPU Runtime 2025Q4 that also has Nova Lake S support as well as some AV1 decode improvements.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2026&image=nova_lake_media_lrg

[2] https://github.com/intel/media-driver/releases/tag/intel-media-25.4.6

[3] https://github.com/intel/vpl-gpu-rt/releases/tag/intel-onevpl-25.4.6


One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic
is our support for UNIX?
Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago.
Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our
VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand,
easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual
users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines.
And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have
good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run
out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end
up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly
check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter
what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if
you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX
is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there.
-- Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984
[It's been argued that the beauty of UNIX is the same as the beauty of Ken
Olsen's brain. Ed.]