[the8472]

AVIF uses AV1 as the codec, so I assume the hardware units used to accelerate video decoding should work for images too, at least when it matches the profiles supported by the hardware.

[Scaevolus]

Hardware video decoding APIs often have significantly more latency than software decoders, to the point that it's a noticeable several hundred milliseconds of delay. If they have this delay, they're unusable for images.

[the8472]

I assume that "a folder full of avif files" was referring to thumbnailing, that's more of a bulk operation than latency-sensitive.