RTX 30 graphics cards support AV1 video hardware decoding

Earlier, we have mentioned that Microsoft is preparing for the hardware acceleration of AV1 video. Hardware acceleration uses GPU computing power to optimize video to help improve smoothness.

However, hardware acceleration based on software is still inferior to hardware direct decoding, and Nvidia’s RTX 30 series graphics cards have already brought AV1 video hard decoding.

The hard decoding brought by Nvidia can significantly improve the rendering speed of AV1 video, but Nvidia does not support hard coding, for the time being, so you have to wait for the RTX 40 series graphics card.

Judging from the support table announced by NVIDIA, both the GA102 and GA104 cores of the Ampere architecture can decode the AV1 format by hardware and support 10-bit color and 8K resolution.

It also supports VP8 8-bit and 4096 x 4096 resolutions, VP9 12-bit 8192 x 8192 resolution, and MPEG2 8-bit 4080 x 4080 resolution.

The above are all hard decoding parts. The hardware encoding part of the support table announced by NVIDIA directly does not mention AV1, which means that all graphics cards currently do not support hard coding.

Currently, the hard-coded parts mainly support H.265/HEVC YUV, H.265/HEVC LOSSLESS, H.264 AVCHD YUV, and LOSSLESS.

Specifically, you can refer to the format, bit depth, color, and highest resolution supported by the current hardware decoding and hardware encoding from the icons produced by NVIDIA.

Source: NVIDIA Video Codec SDK,  NVIDIA Encode/Decode Matrix via TechPowerUP