GeForce RTX 5090: video editors will jump on Nvidia's RTX 50 cards

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5000 generation is here, and the gaming world is talking about the card's 3D performance. But a modern GPU is not just limited to video game use. In addition to accelerating AI models or displaying on multiple screens, modern graphics chips also have fundamental building blocks: multimedia engines.

Called multimedia engine in English, these logic blocks of graphics processors are designed to support video decompression and/or compression. Understand that they are the ones that unload the CPU for reading and writing video files. Their strength is to be ultra fast and consume little energy.

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Their limitation is that they are absolutely neither flexible nor programmable: to perform their task, the compression or decompression of a codec must be programmed in hardware. Unable to decode/encode with unknown codec. If the PC reads a file whose codec is not integrated into the multimedia engine, then the CPU takes over. And it does so at the cost of significant CPU occupancy and power consumption.

The new RTX 5000 series bring with them a new multimedia engine which brings, says the official Nvidia blog “support for professional 4:2:2 color format, multiview-HEVC (MV-HEVC) for 3D video and virtual reality (VR), and new AV1 Ultra High Quality mode.

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Among these new features, one is major for a large number of users: 4:2:2. This allows the card to support large 4:2:2 files, which are much richer in luminance and chrominance information than the much more destructive 4:2:0 format. Concretely, a single multimedia engine can simultaneously decode eight 4K60p streams in 4:2:2.

As for encoding, if an encoder can only work on one task at a time, the power of the encoders adds up. Yes, you correctly detected the plural: encoders.

And one, and two, and (sometimes) three engines!

For this new generation of cards, Nvidia has subtly declined its encoders and decoders. Thus, the RTX 5090 is equipped with three encoders and two decoders, the RTX 5080 with two encoders and two decoders, the GPU 5070 Ti with two encoders and a single decoder, and the RTX 5070 with a single encoder and a single decoder .

The higher we go, the more encoding and decoding units we have. And this is where the RTX5090 will make the difference: its three decoders allow it to take each 3 x 8 = 24 4K60p streams in 4:2:2. Ideal for setting up a multi-stream video station, for the production of a multicam live video for example. Note that with 2 x 8 = 16 streams, the RTX 5080 and 5070 Ti are not one-handed either.

When it comes to compression, the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 can distribute the compression task across their two respective decoders. When we add hardware support for 4:2:2 and the distribution of compression on two engines, we obtain an impressive gain: an h.265 stream in 4:2:2 HQ (high quality) than the RTX 4090 compresses in 28 min 12 s only takes 2 min 54 s on an RTX 5090.

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Generally speaking, Nvidia's communication highlights that these multiple encoders and decoders allow the RTX 5090 to export videos 60% faster than the RTX 4090. And 400% faster than the RTX 3090!

Nvidia untouchable at the high end, Intel in ambush

Not everyone has between €600 and €2300 to invest in a graphics card. In the entry-level segment, neither Nvidia or AMD has a card to play, but Intel. Its latest graphics card, the B580, indeed integrates not one, but two multimedia engines – like the RTX5070 series. Cutting-edge engines, as it is the second generation to support hardware compression/decompression of AV1 and 4:2:2 10-bit and already supports hardware encoding/decoding of HEVC in 4:4:4 10bit. Ideal for an inexpensive editing machine.

As soon as the buyer's budget can increase, and the workflow includes compositing or 3D effects under After Effects or Premiere Pro), AI executions (subtitling, etc.), Nvidia cards are essential . If the sum to be paid for these cards is significant, in the case of an editor who works a lot on 4:2:2 10 bit streams – in particular to benefit from better gradation of tones and to be able to work on colors – the Huge time savings can be quickly paid off.

However, we still have to wait for independent tests to verify the performance of Nvidia's multimedia engine in all codecs. A long and tedious task, but which will allow us to see if the firm's new GPU keeps its promises on a wide range of codecs.

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