14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is a co-founder of the Alliance for Open Media, or AOM, an organization that developed the AV1 standard to allows for better compression and improved video image quality.
And because Microsoft claims that AV1 has become so advanced lately, being able to reach 50% better compression than H.264 and 20% better than VP9 for the same video content, the company is now ready to bring it to Windows 10 on the next-generation hardware.
“This fall, Microsoft’s hardware partners are rolling out hardware-accelerated AV1 video support on new Windows 10 systems with the latest GPUs. With video consuming an ever-increasing portion of the world's internet traffic, better compression technology helps to improve video image quality while also reducing bandwidth consumption,” Microsoft says.
Required chips
To use hardware-accelerated AV1 video on Windows 10 you’ll need Windows 10 version 1909 or newer, the AV1 Video extension from the Microsoft Store, an updated browser (Microsoft Edge will do just fine), the latest graphic drivers, as well as one of the following GPUs or CPUs:
- 11th Gen Intel Core processors with Intel Iris Xe Graphics
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs
- AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series Graphics
“If you want to look under the hood to see when you are receiving AV1, some streaming services have ways to show this information. For example, on YouTube you can right-click on the video and select “Stats for nerds”. When the video is AV1 encoded, you will see “av01…” in the “Codecs” line on the stats overlay,” Microsoft explains.
The Redmond-based tech giant is now getting ready to finalize the work on another Windows 10 version, this time called the October 2020 Update, so updating to this new release should technically get you covered as far as the support for AV1 is concerned, as long as the other requirements are met.