Do you want to get the latest gaming industry news straight to your inbox? Sign up for our daily and weekly newsletters here .
20.12.2023 - 16:23 / pcgamer.com
The Khronos Group is a collaboration between nearly 200 companies, working together to produce various APIs for computing. Its most famous software, such as OpenGL, WebGL, and Vulkan, are all about graphics but for the past few years the consortium has been working on doing the same for video. It's just announced that Vulkan Video, a low-level API for handling video streams, now fully supports the hardware acceleration of the H.264 and H.265 standards for decoding and encoding.
If you're wondering what on Earth an API is, think of it as a translation service. It acts as a middleman between a developer's software and the hardware's drivers, making it far easier to produce an application that makes full use of a device's features. For example, games are typically written in C# or C++ but the instructions in the code are written for whatever API is being used. That could be Direct3D or Vulkan when it comes to the graphics.
Where Direct3D is restricted to Windows-based PCs, Vulkan is available across a range of platforms, such as Linux, Android, MacOS, iOS, and so on. Anything written with Vulkan in mind will work just the same on any of those systems, provided the hardware properly supports Vulkan. However, there hasn't really been a comprehensive cross-platform API for handling video decompression and compression.
That was until the Khronos Group released Vulkan Video a few years ago but the initial version only offered decoding, and even then it wasn't a core feature of the API: It was supported through the use of extensions, which are essentially API-snippets that are proprietary to one vendor's hardware.
With this new release, decoding and encoding of the H.264 and H.265 video format standards are now a core part of Vulkan Video. The decoding of the AV1 format will be coming soon, though exactly when isn't clear, and encoding will be for a later point in the future.
But right now, developers can write their video recording and streaming applications using Vulkan Video and it should work equally as well, no matter what system it's being run on.
I say 'should' because to make use of any hardware acceleration of video decoding/encoding, drivers need to be updated to recognise the API and its instructions. At the moment, only Nvidia has any drivers that support the new Vulkan Video update, and even then, just in its beta drivers. AMD and Intel will apparently update their drivers 'soon' but your guess is as good as mine as to when that will happen.
One of the first applications to be modified for the new API release will be FFmpeg, a free cross-platform tool for recording and streaming video. It's not fully ready yet but one of the developers has confirmed that it's currently being worked on.
You may
Do you want to get the latest gaming industry news straight to your inbox? Sign up for our daily and weekly newsletters here .
Pax Dei will enter Early Access this spring, Mainframe Industries announced today. Their cloud-based sandbox also got an Early Access trailer at this morning’s Nvidia presentation, as the game will launch with DLSS 3 support.
HP is joining the QD-OLED race at CES this year, with its 4K 240Hz HP Omen Transcend 32 Gaming Monitor. Those are some serious specs considering we've only just started seeing UHD QD-OLEDs running at such speeds at this year's show - but HP also has another trick up its sleeve.
Capcom has released a new video in preparation of Monster Hunter’s 20th anniversary, which kicks off in March.
Semiconductor companies have started to reap the benefits of the immense demand from clients like AMD and NVIDIA, as the market records "all-time" high profits in a decade.
A new video has gone live, showcasing gameplay for upcoming open-world RPG Dragon’s Dogma 2. Courtesy of IGN, the video showcases gameplay for four of the game’s vocations—Fighter, Thief, Warrior, and Sorceror.
It has been rumoured for days that billionaire Elon Musk, who owns satellite internet unit Starlink, is about to buy a stake in beleaguered telecom company Vodafone Idea India and it has even affected the stock market price. It was enough to set off speculation across corporate circles and the company has now scrambled to announce its reaction to these reports.
In just a few hours from now, the clock will strike 12 and the world will welcome the year 2024. It is an occasion to celebrate with friends and family and to prepare your New Year's resolutions. But if you are away from your loved ones, it is also the time to reach out to them to wish them well for the year ahead. However, you cannot send the same ‘Happy New Year 2024' message you share with your elders and family with your friends. It requires you to come up with different creative messages. If you are struggling with this, don't worry. We asked the three prominent AI chatbots — OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft Copilot — and they gave us some really good suggestions. Let us check them out.
The Asus ROG Ally is perfectly capable of running the latest and greatest games all by itself, but where's the fun in that. The USB-C port opens you up to a whole host of additional accessories and docking opportunities which means a full desktop style setup is just a few cables away. Of course, the perfect Asus ROG Ally setup is always going to be subjective - you might not even need a keyboard and mouse if you're going for a console style arrangement, and the full suite will be dependent on how often you take your PC on the road. However, if you're building a top of the range rig for one of the best gaming handhelds on the market, you're going to be splashing some cash.
New rules have been laid out by regulators in China that aim to reduce the amount of money gamers spend within video games.
A new video released by notorious rumour channel Moore's Law is Dead is digging into the potential RTX 5090 release date and quotes a source, claiming to be from inside Nvidia, stating that whether it launches its next-gen cards in 2024 will be largely down to how competitive AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs will be.
The New World team is,once again, discussing their methods of storytelling, with a highlight on music and sounds. In prior videos, they’ve touched on the subject, particularly with Brimstone Sands, but now, after four seasonal releases and the first expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, there’s a lot more to talk about.