AV1 hardware decoder implementations

[benwaggoner]

As we're on the verge of lots of devices with hardware AV1 decode, I think it's time for a sticky about this in particular.

As Chrome and Firefox explicitly block HEVC decode even if the OS supports it, PC browsers are where AV1 is going to have the biggest improvement delta. Most other platforms (including Edge and Safari) have HEVC today, where the quality @ perf of HEVC and AV1 are pretty equivalent given relative maturity of encoders. While SW encoders do work, performance is going to be a limitation for 4K and 10-bit (which HDR requires). And the lack of HW DRM provides lots of limitations on premium content availability.

The Intel 11th gen Ice Lake CPUs are the first shipping PC implementation. Here's the best analysis of AV1 decode with Ice Lake I've seen: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3576...yzen-4000.html.

I've not seen a test of DRM on Ice Lake, but I imagine it should work, and if it doesn't, a software bug fix is probably sufficient.

tl;dr works great, and as expected.

[benwaggoner]

Has anyone tested to see if any of the below support AV1 decode?
PlayStation 5
Xbox Series X|S
Apple M1 processor in the new Mac mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro 13"

[hajj_3]

some info about apple m1 possibly have a 4k av1 hardware decoder or hybrid decoder: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads...oding.2269938/

[Yups]

Originally Posted by benwaggoner

The Intel 11th gen Ice Lake CPUs are the first shipping PC implementation.

Tigerlake not Icelake, big difference.

I have tested a few AV1 youtube videos in Chrome with my Tigerlake laptop and it works really good so far.

[birdie]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Hardware

[benwaggoner]

Bad news: it appears that Qualcomm isn't doing HW AV1 in its 2021 chipsets.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16271...88-deep-dive/3

AV1 decoding didn’t make the cut this year unfortunately, which means wide-spread adoption in mobile for the codec will be delayed for another year.

[rubait]

Has anyone tried benchmarking the AV1 decoder performance on Tigerlake using DXVA Checker?

[rubait]

Originally Posted by Yups

Tigerlake not Icelake, big difference.

I have tested a few AV1 youtube videos in Chrome with my Tigerlake laptop and it works really good so far.

Did you try playing back on DXVA checker? It can't seem to recognize the clip.

[Yups]

Originally Posted by rubait

Did you try playing back on DXVA checker? It can't seem to recognize the clip.

When I use D3D11 playback in DXVA Checker there are image artifacts on both LAV Decoder as well as Microsoft AV1 extension. DXVA2 runs on both but only with LAV Decoder it appears to use the GPU.

Using MPC Home Cinema playback runs fine using D3D11 AV1 in LAV.

[Pepsi_Doggo]

RTX 3060Ti decoding 4K HDR(10-bit)@60fps above just 2ms render time:

[hajj_3]

Android tv boxes featuring Amlogic S905X4 chips are now available for as little as £30/$40 delivered from china. These can hardware decode AV1.

[quietvoid]

Originally Posted by hajj_3

Android tv boxes featuring Amlogic S905X4 chips are now available for as little as £30/$40. These can hardware decode AV1.

Personally waiting on certified devices for streaming with hwdec.. hopefully this year.

[benwaggoner]

Has anyone tried the Xbox Series X|S hybrid decoder yet? It's obviously complex to get working, but I can imagine the next gen game consoles are going to be a big share of the AV1 capable living room devices in 2021.

[hajj_3]

Originally Posted by benwaggoner

Has anyone tried the Xbox Series X|S hybrid decoder yet?

Are you sure it can hybrid decode AV1?

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by hajj_3

Are you sure it can hybrid decode AV1?

I am asking because I am not sure. But this sure sounded promising: https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.p...ox#post1929168

[soresu]

Originally Posted by benwaggoner

Has anyone tried the Xbox Series X|S hybrid decoder yet? It's obviously complex to get working, but I can imagine the next gen game consoles are going to be a big share of the AV1 capable living room devices in 2021.

If you look at the system requirements section of the PDF it doesn't actually mention either XSS or XSX.

"Hardware: Xbox One, Xbox One S, or Xbox One X"

The googlesource repo is also labelled " GPU-accelerated AV1 decoder for the Xbox One".

So if someone can integrate this into Kodi or Plex for UWP, and Jaguar is enough to cover entropy decoding there are actually millions of devices in living rooms already.

I wouldn't expect MS to be any help on that score for obvious profit based reasons of pushing people to XSS and XSX.

Hopefully if it does get ported to the new console gen they use as much dav1d AVX2 asm as possible for the entropy decoding stage, I've no idea how much SSSE3 asm is in the current implementation to use on the Jaguar cores.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by soresu

If you look at the system requirements section of the PDF it doesn't actually mention either XSS or XSX.

"Hardware: Xbox One, Xbox One S, or Xbox One X"

The googlesource repo is also labelled " GPU-accelerated AV1 decoder for the Xbox One".

So if someone can integrate this into Kodi or Plex for UWP, and Jaguar is enough to cover entropy decoding there are actually millions of devices in living rooms already.

Entropy decoding isn't that complex, and well suited to fast single cores, and IIRC AV1's mandatory slices for high resolutions allow for parallelized entropy decode. This is a huge improvement from VP8-9, which were very hard to parallelize in decode.

I wouldn't expect MS to be any help on that score for obvious profit based reasons of pushing people to XSS and XSX.

I'm very confident that Microsoft is not worried about lack of demand for the new consoles! And they are putting a big emphasis on a uniform ecosystem. If they see material value in AV1, I'd expect them try to backport it. The real question is if they see value in AV1 over HEVC, which is supported in HW since Xbox One S.

Hopefully if it does get ported to the new console gen they use as much dav1d AVX2 asm as possible for the entropy decoding stage, I've no idea how much SSSE3 asm is in the current implementation to use on the Jaguar cores.

Jaguar doesn't have AVX2, alas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar...architecture):
SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES, CLMUL, MOVBE, AVX, F16C, BMI1

So, that would be friction for backporting dav1d to PS4 or Xbox One. SSSE3 may be sufficient for 4Kp60, though, which is all the previous generation supports anyway. I'm sure an AVX implementation would still be better than SSSE3, and probably less incremental work to develop once there are already SSSE3 and AVX2 implementations to upgrade/downgrade from.

Xbox Series and PS5 have AVX2.

[RanmaCanada]

Originally Posted by hajj_3

Android tv boxes featuring Amlogic S905X4 chips are now available for as little as £30/$40 delivered from china. These can hardware decode AV1.

So I wonder how much longer we have to wait for Amazon to release a new fire device that can decode AV1 haha. I believe the MECOOL boxes are Google certified, so they should work with almost everything but Netflix..

[quietvoid]

FireTV Stick 4K Max:

AV1: Hardware accelerated up to 3840x2160p (4K) @60fps, 100Mbps, Main Profile Level 5.1, Color space 8-bit and 10-bit input with HDR10, HDR10+, and HLG.

Plays smoothly with Youtube 4K 60fps HDR clips on Kodi 20 Nexus.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by RanmaCanada

So I wonder how much longer we have to wait for Amazon to release a new fire device that can decode AV1 haha.

Turns out "seven months."