I’ve always thought gpu/hardware accelerated encoding was the same thing and worse than software encoding quality wise but way way faster. Does that mean the gpu can software encode with vulkan support?
“Software encoding” is just kinda a colloquial term for running on the CPU. Because the alternative was dedicated hardware for the task.
As for the Vulcan part I have no clue how that works. Does vulkan have an Open equivalent or something?
This Reddit comment says it’s more a compatibility layer.
The Vulkan AV1 video encode just wraps the native fixed function calls in a compatibility layer that makes it easy for ffmpeg users and libavcodec integrators to support multiple vendors and OSes. It does not add a new Vulkan-compute based encoder that enables AV1 encoding on GPUs that don’t officially advertise it. So expect it’ll work with Nvidia Ada/Blackwell, AMD RDNA3/4, Intel Arc, and other hardware that officially support for AV1 encoding via their respective APIs.
If you’re already happy using
av1_nvenc, just use that. At best,av1_vulkanshould perform about the same. At worst, it may add slight overhead and limit options/features compared to the latest native API on a given platform. However, Vulkan Video seems to be well-supported for Nvidia.