FFmpeg now supports NVIDIA RTX 40 series AV1 encoding

With the support of AV1 encoding by NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel's latest independent graphics, the royalty-free AV1 video codec is becoming more and more popular, and much more popular software has announced support for AV1 encoding.

Now, the popular video processing command line tool FFmpeg also supports the NVIDIA NVENC AV1 encoder, which claims to provide better quality at lower bitrates, 75% to 100% higher than HEVC (H.265) encoding.

In 2018, the Open Media Alliance (AOMedia) released a new generation of video codec AV1 (AOMedia Video Codec 1.0). Developed in collaboration with the Open Media Alliance, the encoding encodes 4K UHD video with an average 30% higher compression rate than comparable encoders.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series uses the eighth-generation NVIDIA video encoder, or NVENC for short, and adds support for AV1. The new GeForce RTX 4090 brings a huge performance boost, 3rd Gen RT Cores, 4th Gen Tensor Cores, 8th Gen NVIDIA Dual AV1 encoder, and 24GB of Micron G6X memory capable of 1TB/s bandwidth. GeForce RTX 4090 is 2x faster than GeForce RTX 3090 Ti in 3D rendering, artificial intelligence, and video export.

Previously, software such as OBS Studio, Firefox, and Clipping Professional Edition have all announced support for AV1 codec, and Microsoft Windows 11's Android subsystem WSA also supports AV1.