The GeForce RTX 30 series is thus the first family of NVIDIA graphics accelerators to support AV1 decoding in hardware (unfortunately, hardware encoding to AV1 format is not implemented). This free and open-source video codec outperforms H.264 and H.265 and has been gaining popularity in the industry lately.

NVIDIA has added a dedicated page dedicated to AV1 decoding on GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards. The company said Microsoft is adding support for Windows 10; Google has already added support for the AV1 hardware decoder to the Windows 10 Chrome browser and YouTube. work with Twitch is already underway; and the VLC player from VideoLAN will also soon receive an AV1 hardware decoder.

No technical details have been released, but the company appears to have extended its NVDEC Video Codec SDK interface with support for AV1 hardware decoding. It is unlikely that NVIDIA will add AV1 decoding to its VDPAU API for Linux, which has been replaced by NVENC / NVDEC, but it’s good to see the GeForce RTX 30 Series get AV1 decoding capabilities anyway.

By the way, future Tiger Lake graphics in Intel Xe-LP will support hardware AV1 decoding. Let’s hope that the VCN 3.0 video block in Navi 2 accelerators can also speed up AV1 decoding.