If you usually play online games with your friends on a PC, there is a good chance that you have used Discord at least once. The popular voice chat platform (and not only) is in fact very popular in this area and is now enriched with an interesting novelty related to live streaming.
If you started the program in this second half of February 2023, in fact, you may have come across the pop-up that can also be seen in the image at the bottom of the news. The issue that stands out in this area is the promise of "Live streaming in 4K with only 8 Mbps". As Discord itself states: yes, you read it right.
As attentive users might imagine, this refers to the arrival of AV1 encoding (and decoding) on Discord. In short, if you have an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 graphics card (RTX 4080 and RTX 4090), it is now possible to broadcast in UHD even if your internet connection has what Discord calls “minimal bandwidth”.
It's worth noting, however, that this new feature is available only to Discord Nitro subscribers (not Basic). Viewing AV1 content is accessible to everyone. Furthermore, it's already been announced that hardware support for live streaming will be expanded in the future. For more details, you may be interested in consulting the official Discord website.
