At the start of the new year I talked about [1]patches improving AMD Radeon video encode/decode for older GPUs . That work to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's UVD and VCE support has now been merged ahead of the [2]Mesa 25.0 code branching coming up in just over one week.

These patches rework the Video Coding Engine (VCE) and Unified Video Decoder (UVD) support found with older AMD Radeon graphics processors. This doesn't benefit the newest APU and discrete graphics that feature Video Core Next (VCN) but is just about the older pre-Raven/Navi AMD GPUs with VCE/UVD.

David Rosca who has been working on a number of video driver improvements for AMD is the one handling this new UVD/VCE rework. The rework delivers on the following features finally coming to the open-source AMD driver stack for VCE/UVD:

VCE and UVD:

App DPB management (long term references, P hierarchy, reference invalidation, ...)

Slice encoding (128 maximum slices)

VBAQ

Quality presets (Speed, Balanced, Quality)

Min/Max QP

Max frame size

Intra refresh

Raw packed headers

UVD only:

Pre-Encode

Temporal layer rate control

The 30 patches were merged overnight via [3]this merge to Mesa 25.0-devel.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-25-Better-UVD-VCE-Radeon

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Mesa+25.0

[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/32829