Intel’s ARC GPUs definitely have something to turn heads. True challengers to the Radeons and other GeForces, they should be displayed at unbeatable prices and offer excellent performance. Intel even announces that they are able to encode videos in AV1 format, a royalty-free format initiated in 2018 and which offers a much better level of compression than that of its competitors.
Although you can now find H.264 or H.265 really everywhere on the web, its competitor AV1 is still struggling to democratize. Microsoft natively integrated it into Windows 10 two years ago, and Windows 11 naturally followed suit. On YouTube, AV1 videos have been available since 2018, while Vimeo got started the following year. And since 2020, Netflix has been offering its films and series encoded in AV1 on TVs, PS4 and Android devices.
On the hardware side, however, manufacturers still tend to drag their feet. Admittedly, AMD and Nvidia make it possible to decode videos in AV1 via their hardware solutions. On the other hand, encoding, the sinews of war for Youtubers and video editing specialists, is still not supported by the two tenors of graphics cards. Today, to encode a video in AV1, as short as it is, everything relies on the CPU. And you have to be patient… Very patient, even.
ARC GPUs can encode ARC videos natively, saving time!
Things are bound to change in the person from Intelwhich has just formalized its new GPU architecture soberly titled “BOW” (code name: Alchemist). According to the manufacturer, full AV1 support, both in decoding and encoding videos. Intel explains that its solution can generate video in AV1 50 times faster than current solutionswhich rely on pure software encoding.
Read also: Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 – Qualcomm’s next SoC for 2023 will finally feature the AV1 video codec
The manufacturer takes care in passing to recall that AV1 is 20% more efficient than HEVC. Note also that ARC GPUs are also capable of processing other video formats: VP9, HEVC and AVC are fully supportedboth encoding and decoding.
The ARC architecture is available in three ranges: 3, 5 and 7. At present, only the ARC 3 has actually been announced and should be released soon. For ARC 5 and ARC 7, you will have to be patient, since nothing is planned before the summer of 2022.
Source: Intel
