With the Intel Arc Graphics, AMD Radeon RX 7000 series, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series, GPU-accelerated AV1 encoding is now widely available for this royalty-free video codec that is becoming more and more popular. This weekend, FFmpeg added support for using NVENC AV1 with the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series cards.

Timo Rothenpieler merged the NVENC AV1 encoding support and summed it up as:
The encoder seems to be trading blows with hevc_nvenc. In terms of quality at low bitrate cbr settings, it seems to outperform it even. It produces fewer artifacts and the ones it does produce are less jarring to my perception.

At higher bitrates I had a hard time finding differences between the two encoders in terms of subjective visual quality.

Using the 'slow' preset, av1_nvenc outperformed hevc_nvenc in terms of encoding speed by 75% to 100% while performing above tests.

Needless to say, it always massively outperformed h264_nvenc in terms of quality for a given bitrate, while also being slightly faster.

FFmpeg Lands NVIDIA NVENC AV1 Encoding 75% to 100% Faster encoding