If Nvidia drops 4070 and below cards, and RDNA 3 they follow high prices without AV1, Intel will be in a very good position once they optimize their drivers and push their marketing on their AV1 support for entry cards, as well as less bulky than their competitors without special power cords...
RDNA 3
should support AV1 (AMD will make their product announcement in November only and has kept tight lipped since), but even then, in my opinion, it's no longer such a dealbreaker if you don't have it. Modern CPUs can encode it quite efficiently thanks to advances in the codec's development, using
Shutter Encoder (highly recommended, great little app) with my laptop's R5 5600H, the final times tend to be faster than with HEVC for the same file (AVC source). Of course, nowhere near fixed function hardware level of speed, but not too bad. With a 12- or 16- core CPU, you may very well be able to record in real time as with x264 nowadays.
I'm hoping the updated encoding hardware from AMD, coupled with recent and also ongoing improvements in software finally closes the gap with Turing's NVENC (which is also used in Ampere) in AVC quality, I doubt it will catch up with Ada's, though, they seem to be quite buffed up.
On a tangential note, the Ryzen 7000 series with AVX-512 should be a delight for video encoders as well, just like the Sky/Cascade Lake i9 X-series CPUs.
I only congratulate Intel for being first to market with a fixed function AV1 encoder in the A380, even if the GPU is still too much of a gamble for the regular user to adopt yet, Alchemist actually had a series of firsts in the industry and this is probably the star player of its arsenal of new and exciting (also: buggy) things.
