I am in the process of building out a new PC primarily for games but I also do a fair bit of video encoding for my media library before it gets saved off to my NAS. My current video card is a GTX 750TI so just about anything on the market is a massive upgrade for me in terms of graphics performance. I was already thinking about going for a 6700 radeon but i am wondering if hardware AV1 support is worth spending the extra to jump to the radeon 7000 series.
I have heard that AV1 is a 20-30% reduced file size and if a hardware encoder could shrink the substantial encoding times of the software process that seems like it might have value. Most of my stuff is h264 right now. I am just not sure if there is value in spending extra and coding a process to loop through and re-encode thousands of files if it will take 7-8 hours per file and only save ~1gb / file.
Re-encoding a full library does not make a lot of sense to me. You’ll spend hundreds of dollars/euros/… on electricity to save space that costs pennies/TB.
Re-encoding from an already compressed h264 sounds like it will further reduce quality, my gut feeling is that you would need to encode from the least compressed source you can.
Consider which devices are going to play back those files. AV1 support is still spotty on many devices and apps. E.g. Jellyfin on my phone will still reencode despite my phone having support.
My cents would be - Yes and no - no in terms of getting AV1 encoding just for transcoding/re-encoding from h264 to AV1. Yes, in terms of competitive pricing on “new” cards, if you happen to grab a card with it - super - but otherwise the only reason I can se is getting it for the AV1 decoder - since it’s made its way into the HW, I’d say that is a more tempting part for me at least.