Discord now support AV1 streaming with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 video cards

Gerardo Delgado, product manager for content creators of NVIDIA, announced on last Wednesday the 25th that Discord will feature streaming video with the AV1 codec using the new Graphics Cards GeForce RTX 40 with architecture “Ada Lovelace”. The update with this novelty will be released over the next few days for all users.

In addition to the stark jump in performance, the new line of video cards brings important features for video compression and decompression. With the update of the messaging and streaming platform, subscribers of the “Nitro” plan will be able to make live broadcasts with resolution up to 4K @ 60 FPS and rate of 8 Mbps.

Prior to AV1, only OpenH264 video codecs were available in Discord. The application uses hardware acceleration to decompress transmissions in H.264, and the new solution will be no different, as it will extract maximum potential for streaming on the platform using NVIDIA’s most advanced video cards.

Delgado explains that the service uses peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, so it will check if people watching the broadcast have AV1-compliant hardware in Discord. If so, the application uses the codec automatically; if not, the transmission is switched to H.264, so that everyone can see.

To enable broadcasts with AV1, simply:

• go to “User Settings” in Discord,
• click “Voice and video” and scroll to the “Advanced” section.

If the codec option is already available for your account, you can activate it with a click on the switch.

For now, there is no information about support for AV1 transmission using AMD and Intel video cards, which also offer this encoding format.

More Information ℹ

• AV1 Video Codec
• Discord