Last week, Nvidia unveiled RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 graphics cards based on the Ada Lovelace GPU architecture, which the company promised to deliver four times the performance of the previous-generation RTX 30-series Ampere GPUs. But in addition to the game performance improvement, another surprise brought by the RTX 40 graphics card is the support for AV1 media encoding (previously NVIDIA GPUs could only decode AV1 content).
Previously, Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards had been the first to provide support for AV1 encoding, but repeated delays in sales meant that it would lose this first-mover advantage.
Now, the Chromium development team has approved another merge request to enable AV1 encoding on NVIDIA GPUs.
This means that a wide range of users will be able to experience this new feature on upcoming versions of Chromium kernel browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
It is reported that the 8th generation NVENC of the RTX 40 graphics card provides dual AV1 encoder support, and the official promise is to be able to record games at 8K60 quality and nearly twice the export speed.
Thanks to this, the quality of streaming will also be improved – because the efficiency of the AV1 codec is more efficient than H.264 (AVC) and VP9.
