Intel Media Driver & VPL GPU Runtime 2026Q2 Updates Continue Prepping For Nova Lake

Over the past few Intel VA-API Media Driver releases we have seen preparations made for Nova Lake video acceleration. That has continued today with the Intel Media Driver and Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime releases today with their new quarterly feature releases.

Released today was the Intel Media Driver 2026Q2 that continues providing video acceleration on Intel hardware back to Broadwell with the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). With this quarterly feature release there is continued Nova Lake enablement. Nova Lake now has working AV1, HEVC, and AVC encoding with this new driver release. Also new for Nova Lake is enabling AVC and HEVC decode with VDAQM histogram support.

Outside the Nova Lake specific work, the Intel Media Driver 2026Q2 additionally landed UYVY format support and Y416/RGBA64 decode support.

There is also out today VPL GPU Runtime 2026Q2 as the related video processing layer (VPL) API that was formerly part of their oneAPI project. New to the VPL GPU RT update is Nova Lake P platform. The update also fixes AV1 / H.264 / H.265 decoder destruction exception handling and updates to API v2.17.