Microsoft Win11/10 WSL supports D3D12 GPU video acceleration

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen imisaka for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com February 14, Microsoft has announced the addition of D3D12 GPU video acceleration to Windows Subsystem for Linux. Hardware acceleration for video decoding and encoding brings some performance and efficiency benefits by offloading video processing from CPU to GPU. Therefore, users can obtain higher performance, lower energy consumption and higher image resolution.

Gstreamer uses GPU acceleration to play mp4 video in WSL's X11 window. CTOnews.com has learned that hardware-accelerated video processing in Windows Subsystem for Linux is available in any application that uses VAAPI and Mesa 3D D3D12 backends such as Gstreamer and FFmpeg.

This requires Windows Subsystem for Linux 1.1.0 or later, as well as Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS, systemd enabled, and a set of compatible hardware. According to the posts, users need the following PC components to use hardware-accelerated video in WSL.

Users can view the difference in CPU / GPU usage when WSLg hardware video acceleration is enabled or when CPU is used in the Windows Task Manager.

Microsoft blog introduces more about WSL D3D12 GPU video acceleration, click here.