Only realized reading the last line we were comparing h.265 and av1. "Wait.. it should be much better quality and be much more difficult to compute". HEVC/h.265 always created a rather serious performance hit on 30XX serie, glad to read av1 encoder performs better!

I'll need a better/newer CPU/GPU to be able to decode proper AV1. Tried a 52 Mbps 8K HDR 60fps AV1 video... nothing. Tried the same video but 25 Mbps 4K HDR 60fps AV1... still nothing. Tried it with 12 Mbps... some frames here and there, but terrible viewing experience on VLC, MPC-HC, MPC-BE and PotPlayer. My PC can only play AV1 if it's 1080p, and sometimes even then I'll get skipped frames. I'd say AV1 will mostly be used for 720p or lower resolutions; or if higher, only on devices that have HW decoding, because normal CPUs (my i7 8550U CPU is not powerful, but not weak) can't handle high resolution/bitrate AV1 videos.

heffeque:

I'd say AV1 will mostly be used for 720p or lower resolutions; or if higher, only on devices that have HW decoding, because normal CPUs (my i7 8550U CPU is not powerful, but not weak) can't handle high resolution/bitrate AV1 videos.

Its a 5 year old 15 watt 4 core cpu, im sorry to say it is weak for anything these days.

darah:

Its a 5 year old 15 watt 4 core cpu, im sorry to say it is weak for anything these days.

Its performance is similar to a 65W Ryzen 5 1400. Most people's current computers have CPUs that are slower than mine (obviously not talking about the gaming world) or at best a bit faster, which wouldn't be enough for watching 4K AV1 videos. You can't just leave most people's devices unattended, so I'm assuming that's why YouTube's 4K videos are still being encoded on both VP9 and AV1, though strangely enough only on AV1 for 8K videos.

Intel released recently its open source SVT-VC1 wich makes extensive use of AVX2 (for Intel CPUs that's Broadwell and beyond) instructions for both encoding and decoding. GPU hardware decoding is atm supported by iGPUs on Meteor/Alder/Raptor Lake, Ampere/Ada and RX 6000 series.