SVT-AV1 2.1 Released With Yet More Performance Improvements

SVT-AV1 that started out as an open-source AV1 video encoder at Intel and more recently an an Alliance of Open Media project quietly released SVT-AV1 v2.1 last week. With this new SVT-AV1 release are yet more performance optimizations and tuning.

Hassene Tmar of Meta (formerly Intel) continues to lead the new SVT-AV1 releases. With SVT-AV1 v2.1 there are new optimizations, significant speed-ups to various presets while maintaining similar quality levels, ARM optimizations, and other enhancements.

The M0, M3, M5, and M6 presets are seeing 12~40% speed-ups while maintaining similar quality levels to prior releases. The compression efficiency of presets M11 to M13 meanwhile have improved by 1~2%. Not bad at all considering all of the huge gains SVT-AV1 has made over the past several years.

Downloads and more details on the SVT-AV1 2.1 changes via SVT-AV1 on GitLab. I'll be running some new SVT-AV1 benchmarks soon.