AMD Radeon RX 6000, confirmed support for the AV1 codec

A few weeks ago, AMD's presentation of a Linux kernel patch for AV1 decoding support hinted that, as well as NVIDIA Ampere RTX 30 series graphics cards, upcoming Radeon RX 6000s would embrace this technology as well. . Apparently it will!

In fact, Microsoft recently confirmed that AMD's new Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs will support the all-new AV1 codec designed by Alliance for Open Media (AOM). This means that all three major graphics card manufacturers (AMD, NVIDIA and Intel) will support the encoder. Of course, this should accelerate its spread and support, and apparently indicates that the rival H.266 specification is not receiving as much support. However, it remains to be seen whether AMD's integrated GPUs in its desktop and mobile APUs will be able to decode and encode AV1 footage into hardware.

As for the encoder, AV1 is 50% more efficient than H .264 and 20% better than VP9, ​​which means that the final file sizes are halved compared to H.264 encoding, while still offering the same level of quality. This is great news as more and more people are subscribing to FullHD to upgrade to 4K and even 4K 60fps, which can be quite challenging to store and stream on slower internet connections.

Se if you have a GPU with native AV1 support, you can already see its performance on AV1 movies already on YouTube. Simply select a video, right-click and select “Stats for nerds” to check if the AV1 codec is used or not.

We remind you that AMD will present its new line of graphics cards based on the RDNA 2 architecture, also used by the next generation console Sony Playstation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X / S, on October 28th at 18:00 .

Are you looking for a good graphics card based on AMD GPUs? We recommend the XFX RX 5700 XT, which you can buy on Amazon at a special price!