Testing AV1 Encoding: RTX 4090 Review Download Available (Patreon)

Hi everyone, Rich here! With the arrival of Intel Arc and Nvidia RTX 4000, we have a new video compression option available: AV1, notionally a much more efficient codec compared to the existing h.264 and HEVC options. This isn't something where we can offer software-driven encodes - even with a high-end CPU, the time taken to encode a piece of 4K content will simply be too prohibitive. Hardware encoding via GPU will be faster, but won't be as quality-driven as a software encode - but maybe the nature of the codec itself will provide file size savings.

That being the case, I decided to use DaVinci Resolve to create an AV1 encode of the RTX 4090 review, based on the same ProRes export as the existing h.264 and HEVC versions. Encoding options seem limited in Resolve, but I chose whatever constant quality option was available to me within Resolve and a 37.3Mbps file emerged, around 9GB in size - bigger than the HEVC encode on the site already but perhaps of a higher quality? Could it be better than the bandwidth-heavy h.264 version? If you have a modern GPU with AV1 decoding, or a TV that can do it, maybe download it and give it a shot!

It's early days on this but if it works out, it may make sense to add this permanently to digitalfoundry.net downloads, or to replace HEVC, which is time-consuming to encode and in many scenarios does not match h.264 quality.

On another note, there was an error in the colour of graph lines on one of the RTX 4090 DLSS 3 performance renders. This has been corrected with the version on the site now and (hopefully) YouTube can swap in the correct version in due course. Not a big deal, but annoying none the less! The AV1 version is based on this corrected version.

Downloads: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-review-the-next-level-in-graphics-performance