Reporting video encoding support and capabilities Some of the unions only contain pointers to enum types to be consistent, these enum types are also referenced as pointers in the case a new codec requires some more complex type than an enum to represent those concepts. This decision also prevents structures holding members of (or containing anonymous) union types from changing their type sizes when extending the interface. The union types have a constant size based on the pointer size of the host architecture. To preserve the binary interface compatibility on extensibility, the union types always contain pointers to the codec-specific structures. For example, the D3D12DDI_VIDEO_ENCODER_CODEC_CONFIGURATION_0082_0 structure contains a union with pointers to codec-specific D3D12DDI_VIDEO_ENCODER_CODEC_CONFIGURATION_H264_0082_0 and D3D12DDI_VIDEO_ENCODER_CODEC_CONFIGURATION_HEVC_0082_0 structures that contain the codec-specific configuration information.

The codec-specific aspects of the framework's interface are delegated to codec-specific structures and their access to union types. Starting in Windows 11, the supported codecs are H.264 and HEVC, although the D3D12 video encoding framework provides open extensibility for newer codecs such as AV1. 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.

This feature provides a coherent set of encoding APIs/DDIs that are consistent with the existing D3D12 framework, and allows developers to perform video encoding using GPU-accelerated video engines.

Starting in Windows 11, D3D12 added a video encoding feature to the existing video API/DDI family. Prior to Windows 11 (WDDM 3.0), DirectX 12 provided application- and driver-level interfaces (APIs and DDIs) to support GPU acceleration for several video applications, including video decoding, video processing, and motion estimation. For additional information, including application-level specifics, see the D3D Video Encoding Specification. This page provides general information for driver developers regarding the Direct3D12 video encoding feature.

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