Hardware acceleration in VM

[Daniels__Alan1]

Is hardware acceleration for Quick Sync supported in virtual machines now? Without passthrough. On Xeon. KVM or Hyper-V.

Thanks!

[Mark_L_Intel1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Alan,

Basically no. Quick Sync Video is a hardware feature for hardware video acceleration, it is built on GPU, so it requires hardware and graphic driver being available.

For cloud solution, you can check Intel Open Visual Cloud:

https://github.com/openvisualcloud

Mark

[Daniels__Alan1]

Thanks Mark!

I heard somewhere that some platforms had the Quick Sync hardware despite not having a GPU. I suppose that doesn't really make sense though, since the GPU driver is needed to translate the MFX API calls into instructions for the hardware.

Then as a prerequisite, the integrated GPU would need to be virtualized and shared among the VMs? Is that something that will be supported soon?

It seems like a lot of the Open Visual Cloud services would need a GPU (VR/gaming/VDI).

I'll explore the SVT encoding some more. SW encoding is pretty accessible through FFmpeg and such, though low-latency AV1 would definitely be interesting to explore with SVT.

- Alan

[Mark_L_Intel1]

Hi Alan,

Refer to following thread for VM configuration, feel free to post your questions there.

https://github.com/Intel-Media-SDK/MediaSDK/issues/20

SVT has 3 codec supported, HEVC, AV1 and VP9. The other codec through open source platform like FFmpeg and GStreamer.

OVC also support hardware: Xeon E3, VCA, VCAC-A.

Mark