I’m surprised that no one has commented on this. This is great news! It’ll be a couple of years before I build a new desktop, but I’m already looking forward to using an AMD graphics card for the first time in over a decade.
your late to the party
In not sure what difference it makes. AMD already supports VAAPI for accelerated video encoding/decoding.
The video quality for encoding has always been bad with AMD.
I’m hoping that by using Vulkan we can bypass poor quality encoders in drivers and get standardised accelerated encoders.
From my understanding, it’s the hardware that produces bad results. There’s no encoding logic in the drivers itself. That’s why the encoding is accelerated in the first place.
E.g. if the hardware doesn’t support b-frames – which for long it didn’t – a new driver won’t do jack. This is just about how video data gets into and out of the card, any encoding logic is handled by the hardware.
what are the practical advantages/disadvantages of this over vaapi?
Cross-platform, I guess. However, the only platform of commercial interest (and that I know of) that offers Vulkan as the primary, supported API is Android.
