SVT-AV1 Already Seeing Nice Performance Improvements Since Open-Sourcing

It was just a few weeks ago that Intel open-sourced the SVT-AV1 project as a CPU-based AV1 video encoder. In the short time since publishing it, there's already been some significant performance improvements.

Since the start of the month, SVT-AV1 has added multi-threaded CDEF search, more AVX optimizations, and other improvements to this fast evolving AV1 encoder. With having updated the test profile against the latest state as of today, here's a quick look at the performance of this Intel open-source AV1 video encoder.

At the start of the month, it was miserably slow even with HEDT systems...

While still slow, the results as of the latest Git is multiple times faster than at the start of the month. Of course, using the same build configuration and same sample content as part of the test profile with the Phoronix Test Suite. It does appear AVX-512 optimizations in part help a lot with the latest additions given the big increase with the Core i9 7980XE, which previously was slower than Threadripper 2990WX but now much faster. But even the AMD systems are significantly faster now on this latest multi-threaded AV1 video encoder build. It's progress moving in the right direction and not bad for two weeks of work.

Of course, the SVT-HEVC video encoder for H.265 is way faster at this point but also a much more mature code-base.

SVT-AV1 is at least much faster than the AOMedia AV1 video encoder.


While at it, I also did some quick DAV1D AV1 video decoding benchmarks. More details on this quick round of testing via OpenBenchmarking.org. I'll have more SVT-AV1 benchmarks as it continues maturing as a promising open-source AV1 video encoder.