Intel ARC GPUs become the first graphics card to support both AV1 codec

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Intel has officially launched the Intel Arc series discrete graphics code-named Alchemist. ARC discrete graphics card supports very comprehensive codec, including the current mainstream H.264/H.265 and tax-free AV1 codec technology. Some friends may ask, didn’t NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards support AV1 long ago? Indeed, the Nvidia cards and AMD cards only support the decoder. The Intel Arc series of discrete graphics cards support AV1 codec technology at the same time, which can be said to be a big event for the Alliance for Open Media.

As an open tax-free technology, AV1 is currently being gradually adopted by PC and mobile device manufacturers. The reason why AV1 can gradually become popular is mainly that the MPEG alliance is too pitted, and the complicated patent licensing and disguised increase of licensing fees make many manufacturers miserable. At present, only the Alliance for Open Media can challenge the MPEG Alliance in the entire industry, mainly because the adoption rate of the AV1 codec is still very low. The reason for the low adoption rate is largely due to the lack of hardware support because the efficiency of soft decoding AV1 is far less than that of hard decoding H.264 and H.265 technologies.

Intel stated at the press conference that thanks to native support for AV1 encoding technology, Intel Arc series graphics cards encode AV1 video 50 times faster than software encoding. The efficiency of both encoding and decoding software is far less efficient than hardware support.
AV1 encoding technology provides the same video quality while reducing Internet bandwidth consumption, which is extremely attractive to the entire technology industry. Intel said the company is currently working with industry partners to ensure that popular media applications can support AV1 and be widely adopted this year. In addition, Intel also mentioned that compared with the H.265 encoder, the Arc graphics card has a 20% increase in efficiency when encoding AV1 video, and can complete video rendering faster.

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