Intel Arc A770 beats Nvidia RTX 4090 in AV1 8K decoding test

Intel’s Arc A770 desktop GPUs are finally available (more or less), and, although gaming performance is nothing special for their price point, these cards do seem to be well suited for content creation. When it comes to AV1 decoding in 4K and 8K, the A770 seems to provide a much smoother playback compared to the competition, at least according to the data provided by CapFrameX.

In order to test the A770 proficiency for decoding AV1 videos at 4K and 8K resolutions, the developer of the CapFrameX analysis tool has pitted Intel’s top GPU against Nvidia’s RTX 3090 and RTX 4090 gaming models along with AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 XT. The average, 1% and 0.2% fps counts provided by CapFrameX were obtained by performing 4K and 8K decoding on the “Japan in 8K 60 FPS” video uploaded on YouTube.  

The decoding part is arguably less hardware intensive than encoding AV1, but even so, the A770 manages to offer the smoothest 8K AV1 playback with 59.9 average fps and a minimum of 44 fps. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s cards are hitting around 57 max fps, but the minimum figures drop to 16.6 fps, and the RTX 4090 appears to be a tad bit slower than the RTX 3090. A rather embarrassing situation considering that the RTX 4090 also comes with very good hardware AV1 encoding.

Unfortunately, the AMD model offered the lowest framerates even in 4K decoding, with a maximum of 22 and a minimum of 1.2 fps in 8K, which seems awkward for a high-end solution. Frame time also spikes excessively every 4 seconds on the RX 6800 XT.

It would be interesting to see how the A770 handles AV1 encoding versus the RTX 4090, at least for 1080p videos.

Buy the Intel Arc A770 16GB video card on Amazon