Intel Arc AV1 Encoder Beats AMD and Nvidia’s H.264 Encoders in Early Tests

And bref: Intel has struggled to launch its first-year series of dedicated graphics cards, struggling to deliver them to consumers on time and perhaps with unimpressive results in gaming benchmarks. However, they represent the start of encoding AV1 hardware, and early tests show big efficiency gains over Nvidia and AMD H.264 encoders.

The AV1 hardware encoder in Intel’s new Arc A380 destroyed both Nvidia and AMD H.264 encoders in initial real-world testing this week. The results are good news for Intel’s entry into the GPU space and bode well for AV1’s future in content creation.

Late last month, computers with Intel’s entry-level Arc Alchemist graphics cards hit the international market following weeks of delay. YouTuber EposVox bought one of the first A380s available and measured its AV1 encoding once morest several H.264 encoders.

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See also: TechSpot’s Intel Arc A380 review

Support for the new AV1 video codec has grown rapidly over the past few months. It promises more efficient compression than competitors like VP9 or H.264 and is royalty-free unlike H.265.

However, AV1 decoding requires relatively newer hardware like Nvidia’s RTX 30-series graphics cards, AMD’s Radeon 6000 GPUs, or 11th Gen or newer Intel processors.

Apple devices don’t support it yet, but a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip will next year. Streaming services like YouTube, Twitch, and Netflix at least partially support AV1 at the moment and will likely expand support in the future. firefox added AV1 hardware decoding in May following relying on software decoding only.

While hardware decoding to display AV1 content is growing in popularity, encoding to produce AV1 video was only possible via software until Intel Arc. The EposVox results indicate that content creators may wish to switch to the codec as its use expands.

When streaming games like Halo Infinite and Battlefield 2042, Intel’s AV1 encoder produced noticeably cleaner video than H.264 encoders like Nvidia’s NVENC, AMD’s AMF, and Intel’s QSV, even at lower flow rates. The Intel AV1 encoder at 3.5 Mbps seems to beat AMD and Nvidia at 6 Mbps. AV1’s lead diminishes at higher bitrates, but at 6 Mbps it still outperforms the 8 Mbps results of other GPU vendors.

These tests suggest that as more devices and services add AV1 compatibility, they will deliver higher quality streams using less data. AV1 hardware encoding might be integrated into next-generation GPUs from Nvidia and AMD, which are expected to arrive later this year.