AMD joins NVIDIA and Intel with enabling AV1 hardware acceleration on the Radeon RX 6000 series

Microsoft has confirmed that the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series will support AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) hardware acceleration. According to Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) and Netflix, the AV1 codec is 20% more efficient at compressing video files than VP9 and 50% more than H.264. AV1 offers 34% higher data compression too than VP9, too. AMD joins Intel and NVIDIA in supporting AV1, which will also be available on Intel Iris Xe Graphics and RTX 30 series GPUs.

Support for AV1 on the Radeon RX 6000 series should also mean that other RDNA2 chipsets will be capable of AV1 hardware acceleration. Another prerequisite for using the AV1 codec is Windows 10 version 1909 or later, along with the AV1 Video Extension. The latter can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store for free.

TechPowerUp notes that the AV1 codec will use software-based CPU decoding if GPU hardware acceleration is unavailable. If you want to read more about the AV1 codec, then the BBC has published a detailed article that also compares AV1 against codecs like HEVC.