FFmpeg Gets NVENC AV1 Encode Support for a 75-100% Encoding Speed Uplift Over HEVC

[btarunr]

Popular video transcoding and playback software FFmpeg, in its latest update, received support for AV1 format hardware-accelerated encoding leveraging the NVENC AV1 hardware encoders on the latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40-series "Ada" GPUs. The author Timo Rothenpieler remarked that in his testing, the new NVENC AV1 encoder is outperforming the NVENC HEVC-based FFmpeg encoding by 75 to 100 percent, in terms of encoding speed, at comparable quality. When deployed at a data-center scale, or even a production studio-scale, accelerated AV1 encoding should have a tangible impact on costs, and not just because AV1 is a royalty-free format. NVENC AV1 encoding support was also recently added to OBS Studio, the popular free video streaming software.



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[Rowsol]

That is some serious gains.

 

[Fierce Guppy]

Is this what ShadowPlay uses?

 

[Toothless]

Is this what ShadowPlay uses?

Shadowplay (clearly NVIDIA software) uses NVENC.

 

[zlobby]

Ah, such a great tool that tries to do everything but fails at so many things. Kudos to whoever still support it.

 

[noel_fs]

probably cant do multiple encodes at the same time like with HEVC

Ah, such a great tool that tries to do everything but fails at so many things. Kudos to whoever still support it.

whoever? literally everything uses ffmpeg

 

[junglist724]

Shadowplay (clearly NVIDIA software) uses NVENC.

Yes but it does SDR recordings with H.264 and HDR recordings with H.265. It doesn't use AV1 at all yet.

It took 6 years after the GTX 900 series came out with H.265 support for Shadowplay to finally get H.265 10-bit support.

 

[zlobby]

probably cant do multiple encodes at the same time like with HEVC


whoever? literally everything uses ffmpeg

By 'supporting' I mean the active developers.

 

[Fierce Guppy]

Yes but it does SDR recordings with H.264 and HDR recordings with H.265. It doesn't use AV1 at all yet.

It took 6 years after the GTX 900 series came out with H.265 support for Shadowplay to finally get H.265 10-bit support.

Ravic mentioned this yesterday during his BF2042 stream, that AV1 is a superior hardware based codec but is not utilised by shadowplay in Geforce Experience so I thought I'd check here.

Edit: Oh, yeah... I just remembered this useful link. AV1 encoding is only supported by the RTX 4000 series. Now it all makes sense.

 

[b4psm4m]

I wonder what the quality is like compared to CPU encoding.

 

[junglist724]

I wonder what the quality is like compared to CPU encoding.

From my rough testing it's not very good, about on par with NVENC H.265. I really have to lower the CQ value and use the slowest preset to get OBS NVENC AV1 recordings to look almost flawless. Re-encoding in Handbrake using my CPU resulted in a file 1/44th the size that looked about as good to my eyes.

Nvidia only claims NVENC AV1 has 1.45x better efficiency compared to NVENC H.264.