AMD Lands Video Encoding Quality Improvements For Mesa 22.3

AMD has merged video acceleration quality improvements into Mesa 22.3's Gallium3D VA front-end for benefiting open-source video acceleration on Radeon GPUs.

A set of patches that were merged yesterday for Mesa 22.3 adjust the encoding quality default and provide new options for users to fine-tune the encoding quality versus performance. Among the changes are implementing support for encoding preset modes specifically within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's Video Core Next (VCN) code and VBAQ mode support.

With the new code there are presets for the Gallium3D Video Acceleration API support for expressing speed, quality, or balanced presets. Up to this point the open-source AMD Linux driver just supported the "balanced" approach. While there are the changes to the VA Gallium3D front-end itself, currently just the RadeonSI VCN code is exposing the preset support, but now the other Gallium3D drivers can also choose to support the interfaces too. These preset adjustments should work for all Radeon GPUs sporting the VCN block.

AND VCN is found with Raven / Picasso APUs and newer, RDNA1 and newer on the discrete GPU side, and the MI100 Arcturus and newer for the Instinct line-up

Those interested in these patches to improve the video encoding quality for Radeon GPUs on Linux can see this merge request. Unfortunately, the AMD developers involved didn't comment on the expected performance difference or reference quality video sample results for these new available presets.