AVIF Hardware Acceleration on Apple Silicon

This article provides an overview of the current status of AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) hardware acceleration across Apple Silicon devices. While newer generations such as the M3, M4, and A17 Pro chips provide dedicated hardware decoding for AV1 media—which extends to AVIF—Apple Silicon currently lacks dedicated hardware acceleration for AVIF encoding, leaving all export and creation tasks to software processing.

AVIF and Its Dependency on AV1 Hardware

AVIF is an image format derived from the keyframes of the AV1 video codec. Because AVIF images are essentially single-frame AV1 bitstreams, hardware acceleration for AVIF depends directly on whether an Apple Silicon processor includes dedicated AV1 hardware blocks within its media engine.

Hardware Decode Status: Supported on Recent Chips

Apple introduced its first dedicated AV1 hardware decode engine with the A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro, later bringing it to the Mac lineup with the M3 and M4 families of processors.

• M3, M4, and A17 Pro (and newer): These processors feature dedicated hardware decoders capable of parsing AV1 video and AVIF still images. When viewing AVIF images in Safari, Finder, or apps using Apple's ImageIO framework, the workload is offloaded to the hardware decoder, resulting in reduced CPU usage and lower power consumption.
• M1, M2, and A16 (and older): These chips lack native AV1 decode blocks. On these devices, AVIF decoding is handled entirely via software using CPU cores, though performance remains fast enough for standard web browsing due to general CPU speed and Apple's software optimizations introduced starting in macOS 13 Ventura and iOS 16.

Hardware Encode Status: Unsupported Across All Chips

As of the M4 generation, Apple Silicon does not feature hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding. Consequently, hardware acceleration for AVIF encoding does not exist on any Mac or iOS device.

Any process that generates, compresses, or exports AVIF images relies purely on software encoders (such as libavif, rav1e, or svt-av1). While multi-core CPU performance and ARM NEON optimizations allow modern Apple Silicon chips to encode AVIF files at acceptable speeds, the process remains CPU-intensive and lacks the speed and power efficiency of hardware-accelerated formats like JPEG or HEIC.

Summary

AVIF hardware decoding is fully supported on Apple Silicon chips beginning with the M3 family and A17 Pro, while older models rely on CPU-based software decoding. AVIF hardware encoding is entirely unsupported across all existing Apple Silicon hardware, requiring all image creation and export workflows to execute via software.