According to an update to the Bugzilla post, the Mozilla Foundation is finally ready to add hardware acceleration to the AV1 video format. Mozilla plans to support AV1 hardware acceleration in Firefox 100, which will be released on May 3, 2022. The AV1 video format is a standard published by the Open Media Alliance in March 2018 and provides better video compression performance than H.264 and VP9.
Google and Microsoft announced at the end of 2020 that Chrome and Edge browsers support AV1 video hardware acceleration. And Mozilla is in no rush to introduce that support in Firefox. A few months ago, Mozilla said that only about 2% of PCs meet the AV1 hardware acceleration requirements, so hardware acceleration for AV1 is not a priority for the Mozilla Foundation.
According to Microsoft, PCs can run hardware-accelerated AV1 video on Windows 10/11 as long as they meet the following requirements:
- CPU: 11th Gen Core processor and above with Intel Iris Xe Graphics or newer.
- GPU: Nvidia RTX 30 series or AMD RX 6000 series with necessary drivers.
- Operating System: Windows 10 1909 or newer.