Popular video transcoding and playback software FFmpeg, in its latest update, received support for AV1 format hardware-accelerated encoding leveraging the NVENC AV1 hardware encoders on the latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40-series "Ada" GPUs. The author Timo Rothenpieler remarked that in his testing, the new NVENC AV1 encoder is outperforming the NVENC HEVC-based FFmpeg encoding by 75 to 100 percent, in terms of encoding speed, at comparable quality. When deployed at a data-center scale, or even a production studio-scale, accelerated AV1 encoding should have a tangible impact on costs, and not just because AV1 is a royalty-free format. NVENC AV1 encoding support was also recently added to OBS Studio, the popular free video streaming software.

The defining feature of DLSS 3 is AI frame-generation, the ability of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40-series "Ada" GPUs to predict the next frame to one that's rendered by the GPU, and generate the frame without any involvement of the graphics rendering pipeline. NVIDIA is taking this concept to video encoding, too, letting you increase the frame-rate of your videos through the "magic" of frame generation. NVIDIA Ada GPUs' Optical Flow Accelerator (NVOFA) component can apply the same Optical Flow logic for videos as it does for graphics rendering, predict the next frame, and increase frame-rate through AI generation of that frame. NVIDIA refers to this as Engine-assisted Frame-rate Up Conversion (FRUC).

There's more to FRUC than the "smooth motion" features your TV comes with; NVENC compares two real frames from a video, determines motion vectors, and sets up an optical flow stage, so the generated frames that are interpolated with real frames are accurate. NVIDIA will be releasing FRUC as a library, so it can be integrated with popular content-creation and media-consumption applications on NVIDIA Ada GPUs. It allows people with Ada to create higher frame-rate videos; as well as those with Ada GPUs to consume media at higher frame-rates.A video presentation by NVIDIA on the video encoding features of Ada follows.

Intel showed off the video encode acceleration capabilities of its upcoming Data Center GPU codenamed "Arctic Sound M," which features AV1 video encode hardware-acceleration. Intel has been pushing for AV1 to be adopted as the streaming video standard for some years now, as it offers comparable bitrate savings and quality to H.265, but is royalty free, resulting in tens of millions of Dollars of royalty savings for streaming content providers such as Netflix, as well as consumer electronics manufacturers, particularly smart TV makers.

Intel's accelerator is a single-slot, full-height add-on card with a PCI-Express x16 interface. It relies on rack airflow for cooling, and features a metal-channel heatsink. Power is drawn from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. There are no encoding performance numbers put out, except the 30% bitrate savings AV1 offers compared to the current industry standard, H.264. This 30% saving adds up in a big way for a streaming content provider.Intel's video presentation follows.

Encoding video is one of the significant tasks that modern hardware performs. Today, we have some data of AMD and NVIDIA solutions for the problem that shows how good GPU hardware encoders are. Thanks to Chips and Cheese tech media, we have information about AMD's Video Core Next (VCN) encoder found in RDNA2 GPUs and NVIDIA's NVENC (short for NVIDIA Encoder). The site managed to benchmark AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 GPUs. The AMD card features VCN 3.0, while the NVIDIA Turing card features a 6th generation NVENC design. Team red is represented by the latest work, while there exists a 7th generation of NVENC. C&C tested this because it means all that the reviewer possesses.

The metric used for video encoding was Netflix's Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) metric composed by the media giant. In addition to hardware acceleration, the site also tested software acceleration done by libx264, a software library used for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression format. The libx264 software acceleration was running on AMD Ryzen 9 3950X. Benchmark runs included streaming, recording, and transcoding in Overwatch and Elder Scrolls Online.Below, you can find benchmarks of streaming, recording, transcoding, and transcoding speed.

At Intel's 2022 investor meeting, the company has presented a technology roadmap update to give its clients an insight into what is to come. Today, team blue announced one of the first discrete data-centric graphics cards in the lineup, codenamed Arctic Sound-M GPU. Based on the DG2 Xe-HPG variation of Intel Xe GPUs, Arctic Sound-M is the company's first design to enter the data center space. The DG2 GPU features 512 Execution Units (EUs), which get passive cooling from the single-slot design of Arctic Sound's heatsink, envisioned for data center enclosures with external airflow.

One of the most significant selling points that Intel advertises is support for hardware-based AV1 encoding standard. This feature allows the card to achieve a 30% greater bandwidth, and it is the main differentiator between consumer-oriented Arc Alchemist GPUs and itself. The card is powered by PCIe power and an 8-pin EPS power connector. Arctic Sound-M is already sampling to select customers and it will become available in the middle of 2022.Below is Intel's teaser video.

Adobe's Premiere Pro, one of the most common video editing tools in the industry, has received a February update today with version 22.2. The new version brings a wide array of features like Adobe Remix, an advanced audio retiming tool. Alongside that, the latest update accelerates offline text-to-speech capabilities by as much as three times. However, this is not the most significant feature, as we are about to see. Adobe also enabled 10-bit 420 HDR HEVC H/W encoding on Window with Intel and NVIDIA graphics. This feature allows the software to use advanced hardware built-in the NVIDIA Quadro RTX and Intel Iris Xe graphics cards.

The company managed to run some preliminary tests, and you can see the charts below. They significantly improve export times with the latest 22.2 software version that enables HEVC 10-Bit hardware encoding. For Intel GPUs, no special drivers need to be installed. However, for NVIDIA GPUs, Adobe is advising official Studio drivers in combination with Quadro RTX GPUs.

Microsoft today announced the release of H264 and H265 encoding through its DX12 API. The move brings GPU acceleration support for several video applications such as Video Decoding, Video Processing and Motion estimation. Theoretically, this should ease the burden on developers, who instead of having to implement video encoding acceleration according to the graphics vendor (be it AMD, Intel or NVIDIA), can now work through the DX12 API to achieve the same effect throughout all providers, simplifying programming and efficiency efforts - though Microsoft was coy about potential advantages and disadvantages of the new feature.

While the implementation will eventually reach all platforms, the DX12 API encoding integration is currently only available for both Intel and NVIDIA. Work still has to be done on AMD's implementation, which generally uses fixed-hardware function blocks to allow for higher performance whilst encoding and transcoding - at the loss of some flexibility. There are graphics cards driver requirements that have to be fulfilled to enable the full encoding capabilities (and these can also be only partially supported, though performance will undoubtedly suffer).