Does NVIDIA's Vulkan Video Encoder allow directly using raw GPU framebuffers?

[Arcitec]

Here's my desired scenario:

• NVIDIA driver on Linux.
• Render a game frame with Vulkan on the GPU.
• Pass that GPU's raw memory framebuffer directly to the Vulkan Video encoder API.
• Encode the framebuffer as a video frame, without ever needing to copy the raw framebuffer as a roundtrip through the CPU/system RAM.
• So the raw frame never leaves the device. Vulkan directly starts hardware-encoding the in-memory framebuffer that already exists inside the GPU itself.

In other words, doing 100% on-device encoding without transferring raw frames to the system, exactly like what NVIDIA's own NvFBC + NVENC APIs are capable of, but in a universal way.

Is this possible with NVIDIA's Linux driver, using the new Vulkan Video Encoder APIs?

[zlatinski]

Yes, it is possible to do that.
You have two options here:

• Render the game in YUV-color space or
• Do a color conversion from (A)RGB to YCbCr image before the encoder, using a compute shader.

I'm in the process of adding a compute filter to the sample for pre-processing before encoding that will also support RGB to YCbCr conversion.