Open Broadcaster Studio or OBS has added support for the Nvenc AV1 codec for Nvidia RTX 4000 cards. Currently, this only works for recording images and not for live broadcasts, as services like YouTube and Twitch don’t support the codec yet.

Support comes with version 28.1 of the software. It’s Tuesday officially released After an earlier beta release. The release notes describe how the Nvenc AV1 hardware encoder is supported on Windows. There are still restrictions. For example, there is no rescaling in advanced output mode and the tool works only in NV12 and P010 color formats. The codec only works on Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4000 video cards. The RTX 4080 and 4090 both have dual AV1 encoders on board.

Previous generations of Nvidia GPUs only supported AV1 decoding, but no encoding. The AV1 encoder is 40 percent more efficient than the H.264 encoder in the RTX 3000 series and 30 percent more efficient than H.265 encoders. Users can stream it at 1440p, among other things, but in practice, usability will still disappoint. Major streaming platforms like YouTube and Twitch do not support the codec yet.