Does this mean that AV1 on Youtube will finally not melt my CPU, while my nvidia GPU is asleep, or is this just an enabler that will require more work to build upon?
Does this mean that AV1 on Youtube will finally not melt my CPU, while my nvidia GPU is asleep, or is this just an enabler that will require more work to build upon?
If the GPU is new enough to include a hardware AV1 decoder.
For NVIDIA, that means Ampere or newer (RTX 30xx or newer).
Turing or older (RTX 20xx or older) do not have support for AV1.
Vulkan has the advantage of providing a unified interface for video decoding.
Previously on Linux some programs were written to use only the Intel API or only the NVIDIA API. Fewer programs could use any of the 2 video APIs. (The AMD GPUs also supported the Intel API.)
With Vulkan, the same program should work with any GPU.
Vulkan has specific functions for different video codecs. To be able to use the hardware GPU support for AV1, the program that uses Vulkan for video decoding must also include support for AV1, i.e. it must invoke the corresponding Vulkan functions.
For now, it is not clear if Firefox already includes support for all codecs. In the initial version they could have included only partial Vulkan support, for instance only for H.264 video decoding, with the intention to add complete Vulkan support in some future version.
Hopefully this will be supported on Intel Arc cards that have hardware encoding and decoding.