The newest major feature to land in Mesa's open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is support for Vulkan Video!

Merged overnight to Mesa 26.3-devel is the initial support for NVK Vulkan Video with H.264 decoding being supported thus far. It took a while for this Vulkan Video support to come to NVK due to reverse engineering being required around some of the NVIDIA video acceleration handling. There were also delays due to implementing some of the handling within the Rust programming language and thus needing to wait on the necessary Rust driver infrastructure to catch up.

There has been work done on supporting H.265 video decoding too but currently that is wedging the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) so only the H.264 decode is usable with the current code. Due to the dependence on the NVIDIA GSP, only Turing and newer GPUs will support Vulkan Video support on NVK.

The NVK support is merged for Mesa 26.3, which will debut as stable in Q4. This NVK user-space driver code does also depend upon a Nouveau patch merged for Linux 7.3 as the kernel requirement there for supporting NVIDIA Vulkan Video with this open-source driver stack.

This merge has all the details on building Mesa with NVK Vulkan Video support for those interested. After years in varying stages of development, great seeing this finally pan out for Mesa 26.3 due out in November and roughly around the time of the Linux 7.3 stable release.