UPDATE 10/19/2022: A NVIDIA representative contacted Wccftech about the AV1 performance. Any references to "encoding" were changed to "decoding." Additionally, the company states that the "decoding issue" is a glitch and is currently under investigation.
CapFrameX recently tested the AV1 performance of Intel's Arc A770 graphics card against NVIDIA & AMD GPUs at 4K & 8K resolutions. Three other cards, including NVIDIA's RTX 4090, RTX 3080 & AMD RX 6800 XT, were also tested, & I tried my system to see how the performance compares between all five graphics cards.
Native AV1 support in Intel Arc A770 Graphics is put to the test in 8K 60fps YouTube Chrome browser-based testing against rivals NVIDIA and AMD
CapFrameX used the 8K video on YouTube, "Japan in 8K 60fps." For this test, CapFrameX has to be set appropriately so that it can receive the information from Google Chrome's web browser.
To initiate proper capturing on the CapFrameX software, the application entry "chrome" needs to be removed from the application's ignored list to find the appropriate capture and provide the performance results. Also, while playing the video, right-clicking on the video will pull up a menu list, and clicking on "Stats for nerds" will also need to be provided so that we know the statistics.
The cards tested in the CapFrameX AV1 test were:
- Intel Arc A770 Graphics
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
- AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT
I wanted to see how my system also landed compared to the four cards tested and provided the results alongside CapFrameX results for my NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080.
Here are the statistics from CapFrameX and my statistics to provide a better comparison:
The first results of the AV1 testing of the five graphics cards showed the average frames per second and the 1% and 0.2% percentile FPS of each GPU. The one with the darker color is from their test, while mine is provided below their results.
While Intel was the frontrunner of the test, offering 60 fps, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090, RTX 4090, and my RTX 3080 each provided the same 59.9 fps for the video. The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is in last place, providing 55.8 fps, a difference of 4.1 to 4.2 fps in the 4K resolution 60 fps tests.
Next, the 8K resolution of the "Japan in 8K 60fps" video is tested.
The Intel Arc A770 Graphics remains on the top of the list regarding AV1 decoding, producing 59.9 fps in the 8K video. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, 3090, and my 3080 come in at 57.6, 56.8, and 56.7 fps (respectively), showing that NVIDIA maintains the support of AV1 decoding better than the last place AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, which stuttered in at 22 fps.
CapFrameX also provided the Chrome AV1 8K video decoding frame times, which shows that the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT emitted massive spikes of over 800ms every four seconds of video. At the same time, the Intel Arc A770 Graphics remained level during the test with a minor increase at the end, which is negligible compared to AMD.
It is noted that Intel does have native AV1 hardware acceleration in their Arc series graphics, so the results are favorable for the hardware, showing excellent performance in 4K and 8K resolutions. Also, it is great to see that NVIDIA handles AV1 acceleration for its hardware quite well in the two resolutions tested. Hopefully, we will see a change with AMD and the new RDNA 3 architecture, and this test may be repeated at that time. NVIDIA on the other hand needs to get its driver working in order to showcase the full potential of their dual AV1 decoders featured on the Ada Lovelace GPU lineup.
Want to test your GPU against these five? Go to CapFrameX's website to download the newest software, and follow the instructions from the blog post discussed today.
News Sources: CapFrameX, "Japan in 8K 60fps" on YouTube
