Discord, the VoIP and instant messaging social platform, has started rolling out support for AV1, the hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding video streaming codec for NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards. To date, the social platform is the first to offer full support for the codec.
The rollout of AV1 was reported by Gerardo Delgado (@gerdelgado), who also happens to be one to first break the news on the Eye Contact feature that is part and parcel of the NVIDIA Broadcast 1.4 update. They state that codec support began rolling out this week and will be slowly become more available to users in due time.
Discord uses p2p streaming so they will check if the people in your channel can view AV1, and if so use AV1. If someone joins that can't decode it, it will switch automatically to H.264 so everyoen can see.
— Gerardo Delgado (@gerdelgado) January 25, 2023
For the uninitiated, AV1, short for AOMedia Video 1, is an open-source, royalty-free video coding format that was developed as a successor to VP9. Compared to its predecessor, the codec is more efficient in its encoding and decoding compression, with the ability to conduct a 4K 60fps steam at 8Mbps.
In Discord’s case, and because the platform uses P2P streaming, it will check if users and their channels are able to view AV1 videos, and if so, automatically allow them to watch a stream in that format. If someone joins in a stream without support for AV1, then the stream will automatically transcode the video the H.264, which is a format that is widely supported by virtually every device within the last 20 years.
Oh sorry, let me clarify. RTX 30 and 40 series, AMD 6000 and 7000 GPUs, as well as any CPU from 2020 or more recent have AV1 decoders.
— Gerardo Delgado (@gerdelgado) January 25, 2023
At current and to reiterate, Discord’s rollout of AV1 support is currently only being rolled out for NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs. The GPU brand itself has often spoken about how its Ada Lovelace GPUs are able to support the codec, with all cards under the generation being capable of supporting dual NVENC encoders, as well as AV1.
To be clear, AV1 is also supported by NVIDIA’s RTX 30 series, AMD’s RDNA2 and RDNA3 GPUs, as well as Intel’s ARC Alchemist GPUs. However, Discord has yet to roll out support to the other GPUs and it has not given a specific timeline when they will receive it.
(Source: Gerardo Delgado via Twitter, Videocardz)
