NVIDIA First To Offer Driver Support For New Vulkan H.265 & H.264 Video Encode Extensions

NVIDIA has become the first GPU manufacturer to provide driver support for the new Vulkan H.265 and H.264 video encode extensions. This achievement follows the Khronos Group's completion of these extensions for Vulkan, offering a standardized, efficient approach to video creation using H.265 and H.264.

The Vulkan Video extensions facilitate seamless, controllable, and low-overhead video production, marking a significant development in the Vulkan ecosystem. These long-awaited additions have been warmly received by the industry.

NVIDIA has already released its first driver version (BETA) to support these extensions on Windows and Linux platforms. Meanwhile, support from AMD and Intel is anticipated in the near future.

NVIDIA's drivers provide full Vulkan 1.3 support and functionality on NVIDIA GeForce and Quadro graphics cards with GPUs based on Ada Lovelace, Ampere, Turing, Volta, Pascal, and Maxwell (first and second generation). The official driver release took place on December 19, 2023.

Additionally, open-source drivers, such as AMD RADV and ANV, are also adding support for the newly released Vulkan Video Extensions, marking a significant step for the open-source MESA community.