Earlier this year Vulkan Video encode was disabled on newer generations of Intel graphics hardware due to insufficient testing with the Intel ANV open-source driver. That impacted Gen12.5 graphics and newer - basically Alchemist and anything newer. Now at least Gen12.5 graphics with the likes of the Arc A-Series is seeing H.264 and H.265 encoding re-enabled.

The disabling earlier this year was due to Vulkan Video not seeing too much attention on the Intel Linux side. Intel for their part is predominantly focused on the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) with their media driver stack and integrated into the likes of their oneVPL and other software. The Vulkan Video work for ANV has largely come from third parties like Red Hat and Igalia.

Hyunjun Ko of Igalia has now made H.264 and H.265 encode work properly for Gen 12.5 graphics with testing done on an Intel Arc A750 graphics card. This H.264/H.265 encode work is a stepping stone to getting Vulkan Video AV1 encode working on this hardware too.

With this merge today to Mesa 26.2, Intel ANV is now properly handling H.264/H.265 encode for the Alchemist graphics. Hopefully that AV1 code won't be too far behind.