AMD’s “Navi 48” will have AV1 hardware encoders that support B-frames.

AMD’s next-generation Radeon RX 9070 series may have AV1 hardware-accelerated encoding with support for AV1 B-Frames on its “Navi 48” chip. A B-frame is an intermediate frame used in video compression that comprises motion vectors and other data but no picture information. This allows the decoder to rebuild the image component of the frame using temporal frame data. Although it requires a lot of computation, this significantly lowers the stream’s file size or bitrate because virtually every other frame is devoid of visual information. Recently, HXL sniffed out support for AV1 B-Frame hardware-accelerated encode in a commit to one of the SDKs AMD keeps in a public repository through their GPUOpen project.

Two chips, the “Navi 48” and “Navi 44,” will form the basis of AMD’s Radeon RX 9000 series generation, which is driven by the RDNA 4 graphics architecture. The latter will power mainstream and mid-range SKUs, while the former will power performance-segment ones. This time, there isn’t an enthusiast-segment chip. It is anticipated that the “Navi 48” will have more sophisticated hardware for video encoding and decoding than the RDNA 3.5, and as the royalty-free codec becomes more and more popular with online video streaming services, AV1 will probably receive the majority of development. Whether next-generation architectures like RDNA 4 or NVIDIA’s “Blackwell” support VVC acceleration is still up in the air.