Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards based on RDNA2 will receive AV1 hardware decoder
NVIDIA with its Ampere video cards has riveted too much public attention, so AMD decided to correct the situation: recently, there has been a growing wave of rumors and announcements regarding Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards based on RDNA2. Recently, the official image of the accelerator with three fans was published, then live photos of video cards got on the Web, and now it became known about support for AV1.
From the looks of it, the upcoming RDNA2-based AMD Navi 2X GPUs will support AV1 hardware decoding. The AOMedia Video 1 codec is an open, royalty-free video encoding format designed for video transmission over a network with improved compression efficiency. It is Google’s successor to VP9 and a competitor to H.265 (HEVC). AV1 is 30-40% more efficient than VP9.
Several registers of the AV1 codec have been contributed by AMD to the Linux MacOS Big Sur Patch: this confirms that the future RDNA2 architecture will support AV1 decoding on Radeon RX and PRO desktop graphics cards. Both Navi 21 (codenamed Sienna Cichlid) and Navi 22 (Navy Flounder) should receive a Video Core Next 3.0 video decoding unit.
By the way, the Intel Tiger Lake Xe-LP architecture supports AV1 decoding, and the Ampere GeForce RTX 30 series from NVIDIA also received full AV1 acceleration due to the built-in hardware decoder. Microsoft will soon add the AV1 Video Extension to Windows 10. Google has already added support for the AV1 hardware decoder to the Windows 10 Chrome browser and YouTube; work with Twitch is in progress, and the VLC player from VideoLAN will also soon receive support for hardware acceleration AV1.
By the way, some Navi 21 IDs were recently added to the Linux kernel – blogger @_rogame tweeted this:
AMD is known to be planning to add a USB-C port to select Big Navi graphics cards. This information was leaked through Reddit – one of the members of the forum discovered a new patch for the open-source AMDGPU kernel driver for Linux, which mentioned the USB-C interface. The patch and source code clearly mentions the name Sienna Cichlid, which is rumored to be the codename for the Big Navi 21 GPU.
AMD will officially unveil the Radeon RX 6000 series on October 28th. The company has promised to provide more information on the next-generation graphics cards based on RDNA2. AMD hasn’t confirmed a launch date, but the RX 6000 series is expected to hit the market in November.
