NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 GPUs With AV1 Show Visual Advantage Over AMD & Intel Solutions

NVIDIA has showcased how its GeForce RTX 40 GPUs with AV1 encoding deliver far better visual fidelity than comparative solutions for Intel & AMD.

All major GPU vendors, AMD, NVIDIA & Intel, have integrated dedicated AV1 encoders within their current generation of GPUs. Intel was the first to do it with its Arc GPUs followed by NVIDIA's RTX 40 series and finally, AMD with its Radeon RX 7000 GPUs. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 gaming GPUs offer a dual AV1 encoder engine design & have showcased some of the advantages it offers over the competing solutions.

AV1, the next-generation video codec, is expanding its reach with today’s release of OBS Studio 29.1. This latest software update adds support for AV1 streaming to YouTube over Enhanced RTMP.

All GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs — including laptop GPUs and the recently launched GeForce RTX 4070 — support real-time AV1 hardware encoding, providing 40% more efficient encoding on average than H.264 and delivering higher quality than competing GPUs.

Designed to support the rigors of professional content creators, NVENC preserves video quality with a higher accuracy than competitive encoders. GeForce RTX users can stream higher-quality images at the same bitrate as competitive products or encode at a lower bitrate while maintaining a similar picture quality.

via NVIDIA Blogs

To start off, NVIDIA says that its GeForce RTX 40 GPUs with real-time AV1 hardware encoding provides up to 50% better performance compared to NVENC H.264 & also deliver higher image quality. With AV1, gamers, and content creators can stream 4K 60 FPS at 10 Mbps bandwidth versus 20 Mbps for an H.264 stream, opening up their stream to a wider audience. Meanwhile, previous H.264/H.265 encoders maxed out at 1080p 60 FPS at a bit rate of around 6-8 Mbps.

The AV1 Encoding on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs is available throughout various platforms with OBS Studio, Discord, and YouTube being the major highlights. AV1 support on YouTube comes with the latest updates to RTMP which also adds support for HEVC streaming. The Enhanced RTMP has been released on YouTube as a Beta feature that content creators and gamers can put to use.

In a side-by-side comparison published by NVIDIA, the GPU vendor compares its own 8th Gen NVENC with AV1 to Intel's and AMD's AV1 implementation. The Intel and AMD frames look a bit grainy and there's definitely lesser image quality compared to NVIDIA's solution.

The added advantage is that NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 owners can stream higher quality images at the same bit rate or encode at a lower bit rate while maintaining a similar image quality as other GPU vendors. NVIDIA's AV1 solution can definitely provide content creators and gamers who are into streaming a valid reason to upgrade to the newer GPUs. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards are also available at slightly lower prices compared to the launch so now might be the right time to get your hands on shiny new RTX 40 series cards.