AV1 video streaming is almost here, and if Intel’s new Arc GPU encoders are anything to go on, IT’S GAME CHANGING. But it’s also maybe not what everyone was expecting, and I need to explain what all this even means. I’ve been on the AV1 hype train for a few years now, and that train is about to reach the station. I have one of the only Intel Arc A380 GPUs in the country SPECIFICALLY so I can put AV1 encoding to the test. No fluff, pure SCIENCE!

My A380 GPU arrived the same day as my Steam Deck, so instead of enjoying fancy gaming in a portable form factor, I’ve been running oh so many encoder analyses like a mad scientist. So we need a good catch phrase for this… We must go beyond… no, that’s not right. We must go where no man has… no can’t do that either. Oh wait, it says it here. We must venture Into the Unkno- hold on.

“Hey Dave am I allowed to say this?”

“Say what?” “This thing it says on the box. I just sent a screenshot. I’m worried Disney will claim my video” “Oh. Hang on, let me make some calls” “Okay, it’s fixed” “You got Disney to approve it?” “No, I had the box changed” “What the?”

Into the Unkow. Let’s go and unknow some things.

If you haven’t been keeping up, AV1 is a new ecosystem of media technology designed to keep file size requirements small while being high quality enough for the needs of modern video streaming and image-heavy websites. The entire point is to keep it open source and royalty-free, meaning it’s cheap and easy to implement, without having to pay the exorbitant licensing fees that have seemingly made H.265 and the upcoming H.266 dead on arrival for most consumer uses.

AV1 is supported by an organization called the “Alliance for Open Media” in which… nearly every big name you can think of is involved. Samsung, Vimeo, Microsoft, Netflix, Mozilla, AMD, Nvidia, Intel and Arm, Google, Facebook, Cisco, Amazon, Hulu, VideoLAN, Adobe, and hell, even Apple. Basically EVERYONE involved in streaming media wants to cheaper, more open, and higher quality tech to work with, which is no surprise - though some of those companies’ predisposition for absolutely and awfully anti-consumer DRM in the past has me a bit concerned.

Our main focus here is on the video codec, which Twitch has been pushing a roadmap to introduce AV1 streaming on its platform for years, to allow for higher framerate and resolution streaming without higher bandwidth requirements. BUT AV1 also has tools for metadata and even an image format that could replace the HEIF format such as what’s used in iPhones. The only limiting factor right now seems to be the actual protocol to stream AV1 video, as RTMP doesn’t work for it.

I’ve covered decoding AV1 in depth all over the channel the past few years. I’ll have a playlist linked below if you wanna catch up. Hardware decoders were added in Nvidia’s 3000 series GPUs, AMD’s RX6000 series GPUs, and Intel’s most recent rounds of iGPUs. Plus tons of little mobile devices, TVs, and even game consoles going back to the PS4 Pro can play AV1 video now. And if hardware decoders aren’t available, it’s honestly fine to decode on your CPU as long as you’re not watching 8K 60FPS or something. It was also recently shown that Netflix utilizes a very cool feature of AV1 - of which there are probably tons, we just haven’t discovered them all yet - called “Grain Synthesis” which allows the encoder to analyze film grain, remove it to compress, and then bring it back during decode. This is something that helps preserve quality while also still preserving the original artist’s intentions, and I hope YouTube’s pipeline will use this feature as well.

AV1 videos are everywhere on YouTube now. Previously reserved for only high traffic videos, and few ones at that, ever since ramping up new hush hush AV1 encoding hardware in their datacenters, based on spot checking, I’d wager more than half of the videos I watch on a daily basis play back in AV1 for me. You just have to tell YouTube you prefer it in the playback settings. AV1 files also process incredibly quickly if you upload in the codec, as well.

The only downside to AV1, as is always the case with new, high-quality encoders - INCLUDING when H.264 was first introduced after everyone just got caught up on encoding MPEG-2 at reasonable speeds - is that it is FAR slower to encode. Realtime 1080p60 encoding wasn’t even possible until just recently, but it’s improving at a rapid pace. It seems like AV1 development is moving far far more quickly than any other previous codec has taken over, given we’ve had H.264 dominating for like 15 years or more now. But it’s improving. I demo’d the CPU AV1 encoders that OBS introduced in a past update, and they were tough to encode, but the results were promising.

The next step is, of course, GPU encoders. Encoding video on your graphics card has taken over the independent content creator industry, allowing much higher quality and performance to be had while streaming or making videos, without needing to reach for crazy CPUs like Threadrippers. Nvidia was the first to really do it super well, AMD is slowly catching up as I covered in the last video, and Intel’s iGPU-based encoder on their CPUs is now out-performing everyone. But with their debut of their first dedicated graphics card in 24 years, they launched with the first consumer hardware AV1 encoder onboard, too. Let’s see how it stacks up. Yes, it’s graph time. I’m getting better!

Before we get to all the nerdy data, check this out. I spent way too long on this.

The new Backing Track album is legit. We now have a trio of great synth-themed albums after you all have been requesting it for over a year now! We have a lot of juicy synth goodness for you. Go stream it, use it in your videos, it’s in this one. Enjoy.

I don’t know how to say this… but holy balls CPU encoding is just pointless now. These results are incredible. But you’d be forgiven for looking at specific samples and not being impressed at first. Lets walk through the graphs. Be patient, as the results at play here have HUGE implications for the future.

These graphs show each of the GPU encoder’s best results, per my last video about the AMF encoder update with updated comparisons, versus X264 on VerySlow, the CPU SVT-AV1 encoder, and Intel’s GPU AV1 encoder. I chose VerySlow because it’s kind of the unobtanium benchmark of “dream quality” for many, and it’s near impossible to run in realtime due to the specific options it uses. Placebo is the only next step beyond it for X264, and it definitely can’t be run realtime and sometimes scores marginally lower than VerySlow anyway. This data is measured using Netflix’s VMAF quality analysis framework, I detailed it in the previous video, but basically it compares to a completely uncompressed lossless sample of video and measures how a viewer would perceive quality on a scale of 0 to 100 with 100 being a perfect match. I tested a variety of games at 3 different bitrates, 3.5mbps, 6mbps, and 8mbps, to evaluate the scenarios of common bitrate-limited game streaming. I’m only showing the FPS genre here as it best illustrates differences and I still have a massive amount of data to drop later in the year so I’d rather just get you useful data now.

I didn’t go lower than 3.5mbps because 1080p shouldn’t be used at that low of a bitrate - at least not with traditional H.264 encoding - and didn’t go higher than 8 because Twitch doesn’t support that and the differences become less important at that point anyway. YouTube re-encodes your streams, so differences matter even less over there.

As a refresher, AMD’s AMF encoder received some minor updates recently, which you the user can’t actually use yet, but it’s still in last place for overall quality. Nvidia Nvenc performs about 2-5% better depending on bitrate, but Intel’s QuickSync H.264 on the 12th generation CPUs outperforms both by a fair bit, which was quite surprising.

Well, at 6 and 8mbps, X264 VerySlow still outperforms all of these GPU H.264 encoders a fair bit. Not enough to get stuck down an expensive rabbit hole trying to achieve it only to realize you can’t encode it in real-time, but still a decent quality bump. In the low-bitrate 3.5mbps scenario, X264 VerySlow really shines by squeezing the best quality out of every bit.