Thanks to libdav1d's [1] lovingly hand crafted SIMD ASM instructions it's actually possible to reasonably playback AV1 without hardware acceleration, but basically yes: From Snapdragon 8 onwards, Google Tensor G3 onwards, NVIDIA RTX 3000 series onwards. All relatively new .

[1] https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d

It's possible without specific hardware acceleration, but murderous for mobile devices.

Even RISC-V vector assembly[0].

0. https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d/-/issues/435