Microsoft's WDDM 3.2 makes Windows 11 (24H2) video encoding even better with AV1 support

Microsoft's next big feature update, Windows 11 version 24H2, is currently already out for Copilot+ PCs and is expected to be available soon for the rest of the systems too. We published our detailed feature review about it in our dedicated piece.

Microsoft started final testing and certification of eligible systems back in May. This is done to ensure that Windows 11 24H2-ready PCs can support all upcoming features that Windows 11 24H2 will bring.

This Windows feature update debuts with Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) version 3.2 and as is usually the case, the new WDDM brings new features and improvements. Among others, WDDM 3.2 is getting improved driver TDR (timeout detection and recovery) debugging, which can potentially lead to fewer display/graphics driver crashes. We covered it in more detail in this dedicated article.

Aside from that, WDDM 3.2 also improves Direct3D 12 video encoding by adding support for the AV1 codec. Essentially, GPU-accelerated video encoding on Windows is about to get better on Windows 11 24H2.

Microsoft writes:

The Direct3D12 video encoding feature is extended to support AV1 encoding starting in Windows 11, version 24H2 (WDDM 3.2).

 

The existing video-related framework is extended to allow drivers to report AV1 video encoding support and capabilities. The video encode framework provides access to the video encode hardware acceleration capabilities for different scenarios such as Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, media APIs, machine learning and game streaming.

For those wondering, Direct3D 12 Video basically allows Windows applications to harness the power of the GPU to perform hardware-accelerated video decoding as well as encoding, video processing, and motion estimation.

Interestingly, prior to release of Windows 11 (version 21H2, the original Windows 11 release), Microsoft did not support hardware-accelerated encoding. However, with WDDM 3.0 that made its debut with Windows 11 21H2, the tech giant finally added encoding support.

Source

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