Intel's Linux Media Driver Preparing For 20.1 Release, Game Streaming Optimizations

Intel's open-source team working on their media driver for VA-API Linux video acceleration on HD/UHD/Iris Graphics is preparing for its first release of 2020.

Succeeding the Intel Media Driver Q4-19 release from December is now a Media Driver 20.1 version in the works.

On Friday the Intel Media Driver project began seeing 20.1.pre versions appearing on GitHub.

For the Intel Media Driver 20.1 release has been continued enablement of Gen12/Tigerlake support, XRGB 10-bit format support, Gen12 HEVC Parallel HDCP Secure Encode capabilities and various secure transcode bits, enabling of a new resource manager, support for adaptive CQM for AVC LPLA on Gen11, and various fixes.

This Intel Media Driver 20.1 release is also porting "game streaming changes" from Gen11 to Gen12 hardware. For optimizing the game streaming experience while using Intel graphics, the video acceleration driver on these latest generations is exposing AVC low-power lookahead, AVC VDEnc adaptive CQM, AVC VDEnc motion adaptive BRC, and bit rate changes.

Look for the Intel Media Driver 20.1 stable Linux video acceleration release later this quarter.