The new video filter fruc_vulkan (frame rate upconversion) has been officially integrated into the main development branch of the FFmpeg multimedia framework. This feature allows you to use the NVIDIA graphics card’s hardware unit to generate intermediate frames in the video stream, thereby increasing the frame rate (for example, from 24 FPS to 48 FPS or from 30 FPS to 60 FPS).
There was an attempt to implement an interpolation filter back in 2023, but it was rejected due to the proprietary NVIDIA SDK license. The new solution extracts motion vectors via the VK_NV_optical_flow extension, and the compositing and frame compositing itself is performed by its own open FFmpeg shader under the LGPL license. Using Vulkan allows you to build a continuous processing chain of “decoding → hardware interpolation → hardware encoding” entirely in video memory without expensive frame transfers between CPU and GPU.
This filter is available for Ampere, Ada Lovelace and Blackwell architectures (GeForce RTX 30, RTX 40 and RTX 50). Due to Vulkan SDK and driver version requirements, Turing architecture (RTX 20) is not supported.
