Comment -AMD to Support AV1 Hardware Encoding
Tom’s Hardware reported that AMD’s RDNA 3-based GPUs with VCN 4.x engines could support hardware AV1 encoding and decoding. The conclusion is based on details in Linux driver patches and suggests support for 8K content. The news follows Intel’s announcement that its Arc Alchemist GPU will support hardware encoding of AV1.
Separately, Intel has shown its Arctic Sound graphics cards for data centers built around Arc GPUs. The boards use passive cooling to improve suitability for use in servers for cloud encoding of AV1 content.
Tom’s Hardware suggests that Nvidia, the remaining major GPU supplier, will add AV1 support with its Ada architecture later in the year.
Better compression helps enable more 8K content by reducing the bandwidth needed. Still, newer codecs have more complex calculation requirements, so hardware acceleration helps enable 8K content development and distribution.
