Mesa VCN JPEG Decode Patches Posted For AMD Raven Ridge

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa VCN JPEG Decode Patches Posted For AMD Raven Ridge

With the imminent Linux 4.19 kernel release there is VCN JPEG decode support within the AMDGPU DRM driver for use with Raven Ridge APUs. The accompanying user-space patches for the Radeon Gallium3D code have now been posted for making this functionality work on the Linux desktop with these Zen+Vega APUs...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Gallium-VCN-JPEG-Decode-Patches

[simburde]

What's the purpose of this feature? Average Joe has most of his JPEG images decoded by his browser which won't use this HW decoding in any near future.

[dungeon]

What's the purpose of this feature?

I guess HTPC apps could see great use of this, as there people watch movies, but also pictures, etc... so lets use video decode units for everything there

Average Joe has most of his JPEG images decoded by his browser which won't use this HW decoding in any near future.

Well web browsers could use it too potentionaly, but there is a life out of web browsers. Maybe someone wanna watch jpegs via video player or something

Only not sure what happens when it fails to load because of decoder limitations, player must be smart there to not try to decode what it can't

[darkbasic]

Unless some image viewer starts supporting it it's pretty useless. But this is the classic chicken egg problem, so welcome jpeg decoding

[Tomin]

I'm pretty sure that average home user is not a target for this feature. Instead this could be meant for some professional stuff where high resolution video is encoded as (M)JPEG or something like that. Or maybe it's there because it took almost no transistors to implement in addition to all the video decoding that they already had, I don't know.

[dungeon]

Unless some image viewer starts supporting it it's pretty useless.

Well, you just need to turn video player into image viewer... just to give you an idea maybe you can use video player as image viewer, for example this:

https://github.com/occivink/mpv-image-viewer

So if mpv supports this hw decode, this will too

See mvi with gallery-view in action

It would be great to compare in mvi how it goes with and without this decoder I hope AMD decoder won't burn, when it starts doing all these images

[Guest]

Now if there only were some non-shitty notebooks with these APUs out there...

[M@GOid]

Now if there only were some non-shitty notebooks with these APUs out there...

I wouldn't kick a Thinkpad T-series with Raven Ridge (the A485) out of the bed:

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-a-series/ThinkPad-A485/p/22TP2TAA485

[Guest]

I wouldn't kick a Thinkpad T-series with Raven Ridge (the A485) out of the bed:

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops.../p/22TP2TAA485

Okay, the Raven Ridge Thinkpad isn't shitty but it isn't high-end either. There's no 4k screen, the SSD storage goes only up to 512GB, it's relatively thick compared to other high-end laptops. You see this across all manufacturers' lines – their top models all have Intel CPUs and they only bundle the AMD APUs with lower spec models.

[schmidtbag]

If this can be used as a drop-in replacement of libjpeg or libjpeg-turbo then I could see this being hugely useful, as that (to my understanding) should use GPU acceleration even in applications that don't support it. libjpeg is used by many applications.
But, if it doesn't substitute or leverage libjpeg, I don't see how this patch is ever going to be used.