Two years after the competition (Edge and Chrome), Mozilla has just announced the arrival of AV1 hardware acceleration in its Firefox browser. It will be available in version 100, scheduled for May 3.
Why such a delay? Mozilla justifies itself by explaining that this development was not a priority, because only 2% of PCs can take advantage of it. Indeed, the function must be present in the operating system and especially at the level of the GPU.
Especially for new Windows machines
Thus, Microsoft specifies that Windows 10 and Windows 11 PCs can only use AV1 hardware acceleration if they have an 11th generation (or higher) Intel Core processor with an Intel Iris Xe (or higher) GPU, or NVIDIA RTX 30 Series or AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series GPUs.
Note that AV1 hardware acceleration is not taken into account in Apple’s M1 SoCs, nor in macOS. For mobile devices, SoCs to offer this function are currently rare. Examples include Samsung’s Exynos 2100 and 2200, as well as the MediaTek Dimensity 1000 and above. For Qualcomm, we will have to wait for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, while Apple is skipping its current chips. Which is not surprising since the Cupertino giant actively supports AV1’s direct competitor, H.265.
Fortunately, you can watch AV1 videos without hardware acceleration, but this leads to greater consumption of CPU resources, with the potential impact on the autonomy of portable machines and on the fluidity of the display.
Announced in March 2018, the AV1 open-source video codec was developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), which includes among others Amazon, Apple, which joined later, Cisco, Google, Huawei, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia and Samsung. As tests have proven, it offers better compression than VP9 (about 20%), H.264 (about 50%) and H.265 codecs, as well as better image quality. Furthermore, the codec can be used without having to pay royalties.
Source : Neowin