Finally, AV1 encoding in DaVinci Resolve Studio for AMD users
BlackMagic announced the latest beta of their video software now supports Radeon AV1 encoders.
Radeon RX 7900 users can now take advantage of the AV1 encoding in DaVinci Resolve, a free tool for video editing. The AV1 encoding is superior over H265 (HEVC) for many reasons, including smaller file sizes at higher image quality. More importantly, AV1 is royalty-free, while HEVC is royalty bearing. Those are the clear advantages of AV1, but there is one major downside.
Unlike HEVC, AV1 hardware acceleration support is still reaching new platforms. The HEVC format is now supported by all major CPU/GPU makers, including AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, Apple, or Qualcomm and the same applies to AV1 decoding. However, AV1 encoding is a slightly different story.
Developers of the DaVinci software were in no rush to introduce AV1 encode support for AMD GPUs. Intel Arc graphics were already supported in April last year, even though there were no high-end desktop Arc A7 GPUs available at that time. Support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series had been added as new cards were announced. On the other hand, Radeon users had to wait 5 months to finally test the AV1 encoding.
The latest public beta for Resolve Studio now supports ‘hardware accelerated AV1 encode on AMD systems’. The changelog does not list any particular GPUs, so this might be broader support for all modern GPUs, including RDNA3 architecture on AMD Phoenix APUs.
DaVinci Resolve 18.5 b2 Changelog
- Ability to perform hardware accelerated AV1 encode on AMD systems on DaVinci Resolve.
- Improved bitrate and quality when encoding AAC audio in Windows 11.
- Addressed an issue with syncing Blackmagic Presentations markers in DaVinci Resolve.
- Addressed an issue with temp and tint wheel sensitivity on the micro and mini panels.
- Addressed an issue with composite mode being applied on disabled nodes.
- Addressed issue with setting color space in the media pool for color managed timelines.
- Addressed an issue with magic mask tracking after rippling node changes.
- Node graph composite mode live preview with Alt/Option.
- Addressed incorrect gamma when caching to Apple ProRes 4444 on Apple Silicon.
- Addressed an issue with viewing subtitle controls in inspector in the cut page.
- Addressed an issue with crop in the Resolve FX Transform plugin.
- Addressed an issue with toggling visibility for markers using keyboard shortcuts.
- Addressed an issue with line spacing with imported SRT files.
- Addressed an issue with playback speed variance when switching to cinema viewer.
- Addressed audio playback issues when changing clip speed with pitch correction.
- Addressed an issue with external Dolby Atmos renderer metadata in fixed bus mode.
- Addressed an issue with applying Dolby Atmos master gain on exports.
- Addressed incorrect sync point offset when copying and pasting in range mode.
- Addressed incorrect colors for edit groups created from the track index.
- Addressed a decode issue for H.264 clips on some Windows systems.
- Addressed an issue with H.265 playback performance on some AMD systems.
- Addressed an issue with offline audio clips in an OpenTimelineIO import.
- Addressed an issue with OpenTimelineIO export in DaVinci Resolve.
- Addressed issues with per-timeline overrides for disabling Fusion tone mapping.
- Addressed dragging of media pool assets to Fusion inspector.
- Additional shading options in Fusion viewer dropdown.
- Additional control visibility options to Fusion uCamera.
- Overlays for the viewed camera are now hidden in the USD viewer.
- Click viewer dropdown to toggle between camera and scene lights.
- Support for film back fitting options in uRenderer.
- Addressed an issue with clamped highlights in some Fusion viewer LUTs.
- Addressed an issue inserting tools without outputs into an existing pipe.
- Addressed an issue with reloading invalid paths in uLoader.
- Addressed an issue with uRenderer cameras list.
- Addressed an issue when copying PoV from an existing scene camera.
- Addressed an issue with 3D and USD viewer labels in some languages.
- Scripting API support to create subtitles from timeline audio.
- Scripting API support to transcribe source clips.
- General performance and stability improvements.
Source: BlackMagic
