NVIDIA RTX 30 Series Supports AV1 Accelerated Video Decoding

[MadeUpName]

I can't deliver h.265 to any customer they all want h.264.

Decode is nice but not all that necessary. I was freaked out about all the comments about how intensive AV1 was on both the encode and decode side. I recently switched Firefox to prefer AV1 to see how it would work out. Watching "Japan in 8k" @4k/24 on YT doesn't even get the fan to spin up on my machine. BTW" Japan in 8K" is just beautiful.

4K @60 is a choker on my system so decode could be useful for that except I can't imagine ever watching some thing AV1 4K @60 other than a test.

Now on the encode side AV1 at least on Linux currently is a non starter. That AOM? ecoder runs at 0fp/s. FFMpeg has a new release comming out that will support a couple of new encoders and I hope they make a real difference. I would like to start converting all my older stuff to AV1 to free up some space and get rid of the MPEG-LA shite.

[tildearrow]

Newer video codecs are always slow in adoption. It will be years before AV1 will have a high relevance....

I agree, but see the next paragraph about HEVC....

both of them, h264 and h265, true. AV1, being royalty free, will help on that front. It's just not there yet.

The thing is that MPEG LA is more aggressive about HEVC than H.264.
H.264 is royalty-free for non-commercial usage.

Yep. You don't need to consider only current usage if you want and guess things to move forward. It's the same with X11: Nowaday it's still in heavy use, nonetheless it will die for superior solutions.

I guess you're part of the "deprecate everything" team.... Let me quote AVGN:

There's a difference between something that's "old-school" and something that's "outdated".
"Old-school" is like Atari 2600. The games are primitive, but they're still fun to play. You can always go back to them.
"Outdated" is something you NEVER want to go back to.

Due to the fact MPEG LA is so aggressive about HEVC, everyone stays on H.264. See how it isn't "outdated"?

[mdedetrich]

Supporting new Codecs doesn't have to mean removing support for older stuff that is still heavily used in the real world

This is one massive point that everyone seems to be missing. I don't see why AMD had to remove support for an older codec especially considering its still the primary one being used.

On topic, glad that we have a dedicated AV1 decoder, especially nice with youtube 4k AV1 content. Hopefully the blob will support it soon enough.

[OneTimeShot]

Newer video codecs are always slow in adoption. It will be years before AV1 will have a high relevance....

Erm... again... h265 has been obsoleted by h266, so its adoption rate is not going to increase much at this point. Even MPEG knows HEVC failed big time (and many suspect that h266 won't fare better).

h264 is the JPEG of video. It works and people don't see a need to upgrade, so labelling it "outdated" is just silly.

[Hibbelharry]

The thing is that MPEG LA is more aggressive about HEVC than H.264.
H.264 is royalty-free for non-commercial usage.

The MPEG is currently next to disbanding... but thats another story....

I guess you're part of the "deprecate everything" team.... Let me quote AVGN:

Not exactly, but If things are superseeded by better solutions fulfilling the same usecase, then yes.

Due to the fact MPEG LA is so aggressive about HEVC, everyone stays on H.264. See how it isn't "outdated"?

Who exactly is "everybody"?
Youtube uses VP9. Netflix does h265,...

And: H264 is outdated because there are other codecs that do a better job in high quality video compression using less space while being well standardized.

This is one massive point that everyone seems to be missing. I don't see why AMD had to remove support for an older codec especially considering its still the primary one being used.

It takes up chip space, drives up manufacturing cost and is superseeded.

[polarathene]

Erm... again... h265 has been obsoleted by h266, so its adoption rate is not going to increase much at this point. Even MPEG knows HEVC failed big time (and many suspect that h266 won't fare better).

h264 is the JPEG of video. It works and people don't see a need to upgrade, so labelling it "outdated" is just silly.

Apart from licensing/royalties cost, h.264 has widespread and efficient/cheap HW accel enc/dec support. h.265 isn't at that level, so it's like webp vs jpg has been, except since the start of this year Firefox jumped on webp adoption as well, and Safari should have it in a near release too. h.265 is appearing more commonly in HW support though and it'll take a while before h.266 catches up to that, while it also competes against AV1 adoption and it's perks.

Just like Wayland or other newer tech like those HDR displays (the ones with some specification of different levels of features) and Display Port 2.0, adoption of these takes time, some are still not all that practical depending on context too. Hell, mDNS was effectively made official by Apple over a decade ago, Windows 10 has only recently been adding some proper native support for it, Linux has had support for it for well over a decade (but missed some new RFC modifications without a release of nss-mdns for a decade to be compatible with that), but Android to this date still doesn't support mDNS except when explicitly configured by a developer for their app.

Nobody really remembers h.261/262/263 much, big gap between that and h.264 (arrived in 2003), but h.264 had better timing with it's benefits and other forms of media, there was a lot of other codecs back then though IIRC, h.264 wasn't the JPEG of video for a while. Likewise with Wifi, 802.11N would be your common equivalent, although 802.11ac is finally starting to take that spot and that's been out for quite a while too. Once there is a replacement that is so commonly available to consumers, it'll be the new default, just takes time.

[birdie]

call me when it works in nouveau, I'm not letting any binary blobs on my computers ;-)

You have zero computers, right? Because no fucking way you could be running without UEFI BIOS (closed source blob), ROMs for your HDD/SSD, NIC and your classy AMD card which doesn't even work without firmware. Open Source fans never fail to impress with their idolatry and total lack of knowledge.

[chithanh]

Supporting new Codecs doesn't have to mean removing support for older stuff that is still heavily used in the real world

The older videos are encoded H.264 and can remain that way.

The thing is that MPEG LA is more aggressive about HEVC than H.264.
H.264 is royalty-free for non-commercial usage.

The MPEG is currently next to disbanding... but thats another story....

Do note that "MPEG" and "MPEG LA" are two entirely different organizations.

Apart from licensing/royalties cost, h.264 has widespread and efficient/cheap HW accel enc/dec support. h.265 isn't at that level, so it's like webp vs jpg has been, except since the start of this year Firefox jumped on webp adoption as well, and Safari should have it in a near release too. h.265 is appearing more commonly in HW support though and it'll take a while before h.266 catches up to that, while it also competes against AV1 adoption and it's perks.

I think that is grossly understating it.

AMD supports H.265 hardware decode since Carrizo (2015).
Intel supports partial H.265 hardware decode since Haswell (2014) and full hardware decode since Skylake (2016).
NVidia supports H.265 hardware decode since Maxwell (2014).

For mobile SoCs, support is pervasive in devices that have been released in the last 5 years. iPhone 6 (2014) had partial support and since iPhone 7 (2016) there is full encode and decode support.

[polarathene]

AMD supports H.265 hardware decode since Carrizo (2015).
Intel supports partial H.265 hardware decode since Haswell (2014) and full hardware decode since Skylake (2016).
NVidia supports H.265 hardware decode since Maxwell (2014).

For mobile SoCs, support is pervasive in devices that have been released in the last 5 years. iPhone 6 (2014) had partial support and since iPhone 7 (2016) there is full encode and decode support.

Yes... hardware support has been available for a while, but adoption still lags behind. I am on a machine I built in 2016, with Skylake. Probably plenty of others still using machines with hardware older than that still. So while for many of those that don't have h265 support, they probably do have h264 support. These things take time...

I believe similarly with popular game engines, Unity and UE, their support for video codecs is rather limited. I know back in late 2017 when I was evaluating usage of such, I think we could use HEVC but only on Windows, was a no-go for mobile platforms, not sure about macOS and Linux was possible but bit hacky IIRC. I think that might be better supported in past year or two, and historically the video support was pretty bad before h264 with game engines.

Even with browsers, you'll find that out of the box support is pretty shit still: https://caniuse.com/#feat=hevc

There is some extensions/plugins to provide it, and I think Chromium can be compiled with support optionally. But even in 2020, you can't expect native support of h265 to your users.

Here's another report on mobile platform support from 2018, adoption was lacking there too(5 years from HEVC being available/ready): https://www.scientiamobile.com/growi...obile-devices/

Likewise, SoC support varies for it too, it's still not standard to come across, if available is usually decode not encode. RPi4 IIRC can decode HEVC but is limited to something like 1080p.

EDIT: Regarding game engine usage, I was particularly interested in 10-bit monochromatic encoding, so even more uncommon. I can't recall how that compares to h264/AVC, I think they have a profile for it but actual support for that varies?

[microcode]

Nice. Not really that big of a deal since any video I'd like to decode works fine with dav1d, but it's good to see products hitting the market.