All new NVIDIA RTX 3000 GPUs announced to have AV1 hardware decoder

[Alkl]

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-30-series-av1-decoding/


[Attachment 54735 - Click to enlarge]

[butterw]

Am I wrong to assume that pretty much any PC can decode AV1 in software (AV1 main 10bit @1080p60 2Mbps), given that decoding complexity is about 1.5x hevc ?

[Alkl]

It's more complex than that.

The dav1d decoder has (nearly?) all 8bit asm optimisations, which means that playback is no issue.

10bit however has no asm AVX2 optimisations yet (ARMv8 asm is implemented tho).

Playback is still very problematic for 10bit content. Seeking and playing results in a very high (inefficient) cpu-usage.

Most Desktop CPU's (Mid-Range / High-End) will probably be able to play 10bit just fine. Depending on the used encoder setting it can change pretty much (tiles, specific encoder/decoder filters etc)

[butterw]

Good to know, thanks.

youtube provides AV1 encodes (up to 1080p60) for all recent videos with 1M views, including the RTX3000 launch event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKx-eMAVK70
(youtube-dl code: 399)
AV1 main 1080p30 8bit, 1Mbps: plays OK on i3-4150, tested with software decoding (LAV) with mpc-hc video player.

[Alkl]

It's also important to note, that the latest VLC Nightlys have a dav1d playback bug (since month), were playback is nearly not possible anymore with 10bit.

If anyone else experience playback issues with VLC, try mpv or mpc-hc