Get ready to see Hardware Accelerated AV1 Video Support on Windows 10

Microsoft has announced that they will roll out support for the AV1 video codec for Windows 10 computers with the latest GPUs this fall. This will use hardware acceleration instead of software, which in turn reduces power consumption and increase battery life.

There’s also an extension on the Microsoft Store that enables PCs to play videos according to the AV1 video coding format.

In order to get hardware acceleration support on your PC, here are the requirements –

• One of these new GPUs or CPUs:
  • 11th Gen Intel Core processors with Intel Iris X^e Graphics
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs
  • AMD Radeon™ RX 6000 Series Graphics (coming soon)
• Windows 10 build 1909 or later
• The AV1 Video Extension
• A web browser or other application with hardware acceleration support for AV1, including apps built on top of Media Foundation
• As is common with new features like this, you may need to update your graphics driver from time to time to get the latest features and improvements.

To learn even more about AV1, check out AOM’s get started page. There is an open source AV1 decoder implementation, dav1d, developed by VideoLAN and FFmpeg and sponsored by AOM. Windows media developers who are using DirectX may want to look at the AV1 support in DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA).