SVT-AV1 Can Now Achieve 1080p @ 60 FPS AV1 Video Encoding On Select Configurations

The performance out of Intel's SVT video encoders for offering great CPU-based video encoding performance for the likes of HEVC / AV1 / VP9 continues maturing quite nicely. Since discovering Intel's open-source work at the start of February and benchmarking it several times since, its performance has continued to improve particularly for the SVT-AV1 encoder.

The work on SVT-AV1 is notable considering all of the other CPU-based AV1 video encoders have been notoriously slow. As of the latest performance optimizations in their Git tree, when using the 8th level encoding pre-set, SVT-AV1 should be capable of achieving up to 1080p @ 60 FPS when using a Xeon Platinum 8180 processor. That's quite a beefy CPU, but the results are impressive when considering where the SVT-AV1 performance was even at one week ago.

This Git commit outlines the latest batch of optimizations that landed on Tuesday.

Given the interest in SVT and the frequent performance advancements we've been seeing, on a few spare boxes earlier this month I started running daily benchmarks of the SVT* Git encoders. Indeed, the latest runs as of today show some nice performance improvements.

Over the past day the performance went from 10 FPS or less for encode speed to now 17 to 20 FPS on these systems that are much less powerful than a Xeon 8180.