Intel confirms that Meteor Lake will be able to render AV1 in hardware

Meteoric Lakewhich is supposed to be the next generation of computer processors. Intel, generates conflicting information about it. On the one hand, there are strong rumors about the cancellation of lines aimed at the desktop, but on the other, there are news that indicate that as a technology, this will mean a significant qualitative leap in terms of the capabilities of integrated graphics. accelerator.

If last summer we reported that Intel Meteor Lake integrated graphics (iGPU) will speed up ray tracing, now we remind you that the company introduced AV1 hardware rendering support for this generation of processors. This was made famous by Intel Media Driver, the chip giant’s multimedia driver for VA-API, the main hardware acceleration framework used in Linux.

To be more specific, Intel has already confirmed this Mater Lake and Arc Alchemist graphics will be able to reproduce and render AV1 in hardware, i.e. using the graphics instead of the CPU.. AV1 is a free video format license fees which aims to establish itself as a new standard compared to H.264/x264 with the advantage of being 50% more efficient (offering the same quality and taking up less disk space).

Intel is one of the biggest stakeholders in promoting AV1, in fact they have co-developed a renderer with Netflix, SVT-AV1, which aims to be a successor to libaom-av1, which is too CPU heavy for many to use. SVT-AV1 is already available in the advanced video output settings of OBS Studio, although its implementation in free video editors such as Kdenlive and Shotcut is still pending, and DaVinci Resolve supports it through NVENC (NVIDIA).

The integrated graphics of Intel Meteor Lake processors may represent a huge quantum leap, but it remains to be seen whether it will eventually reach end users at least in 2023, as in recent days, a rumor has spread that the desktop line could be canceled and that the company would decide to renew Raptor Lake until 2023.

The reasons behind the cancellation of Meteor Lake for desktop could have its answer in the competition. AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processors have fallen in sales due to the requirement to replace the motherboard, the prices of the motherboards themselves, and compatibility with only DDR5 memory. On the other hand, it is known that hardware sales are collapsing due to the context of many crises in which we are immersed, and why not say it, at prices that are gradually turning the PC into a platform within the reach of few. , especially with regard to playing games and some professional sectors.