Nvidia RTX 4090, 4080 will soon be able to stream AV1 on Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome

Last week, Nvidia launched its RTX 40-series graphics card based on the new Ada Lovelace architecture. The company is promising up to four times more performance than last gen cards. You can see how the new cards compare to last gen spec-wise in this article here.

Aside from the uplift to gaming performance, the new Nvidia cards also bring new media capabilities which now includes support for AV1 encode. Prior to this, the Nvidia cards were only capable of decoding AV1 content. Only Intel Arc GPUs supported AV1 encoding before this. But sadly for Team Blue, the delay in Arc's release means it has lost that advantage.

In order to take advantage of the new-found capabilities, the Chromium development team approved a merge request to enable AV1 encoding on the new Nvidia GPUs. The feature should be up and running in the upcoming release channel builds for Chromium-based browsers like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and more.

The new RTX 40-series cards feature the 8th Gen NVENC with dual AV1 encoders. With this, Nvidia promises game recordings with 8K60 quality and nearly two times faster export speeds. And with this merge, streaming quality will also see an improvement since AV1 is more efficient than H.264 (AVC) and VP9 codecs.

Source: Chromium