We currently know very little about the new AMD Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards, also known as Big Navi. These new graphics cards look like they will make a significant performance leap. One reason is that AMD RDNAs support video encoding using AV1 (AOMedia Video 1). This compression codec promises a data compression of up to 34%.
Support for AV1 in RDNA2 is something that has been confirmed by Microsoft on its official blog. To be able to use these types of instructions, Windows 10 1909 or later will be needed, as well as the video extension AV1. This makes it more plausible that the AMD Radeon RX 6000 can compete with the new NVIDIA RTX 3000.
AMD Radeon RX 6000 will support AV1 encoding
Microsoft reports that Intel, NVIDIA and AMD already have or will have products on the market this fall that will support AV1 acceleration. Intel has introduced the Tiger Lake-U processors which integrate Xe-LP graphics with AV1 support. NVIDIA for its part has recently released RTX 3000 Ampere graphics that support AV1 instructions. AMD has not announced anything yet, but the RX 6000 will be presented later this month and therefore will support AV1.
These are the components required to experience hardware accelerated AV1 video in Windows 10:
- One of these new GPUs or CPUs:
- 11th Gen Intel Core Processors with Intel Iris Xe Graphics
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series GPU
- AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics (coming soon)
- Windows 10 build 1909 or later
- The AV1 video extension
- A web browser or other application with hardware acceleration support for AV1, including applications built on the Media Foundation
- As is common with new features like this, you may need to update your graphics driver from time to time to get the latest features and improvements
Microsoft Blog
We must take into account that the encoding and decoding process, the important thing is the transmission time of the content. There are many encoding algorithms, but without hardware acceleration, they are slower and heavier than AV1. VCC (Versatile Video Coding) in HD is up to 28% faster than AV1 and up to 34% faster in UHD. The problem is that VCC requires 70% more time to encode and up to 54% longer to decode than AV1.
[irp]
