SVT-AV1, Dav1d Speeding Along AV1 Into 2021

While consumer GPUs are reaching market with AV1 decode acceleration, there still is the matter of the various media APIs and multimedia software making use of it. In cases where that is missing or the user doesn't yet have a supported Tiger Lake / Ampere / RDNA2 GPU, the dav1d decoder remains the fastest open-source CPU-based AV1 decoder. Similarly, SVT-AV1 remains the fastest CPU-based AV1 encoder available.

It's looking like dav1d 0.8 is about to be released as the latest update for this AV1 decoder out of the VideoLAN project. The dav1d 0.8.0 release wasn't yet tagged but its news file already update. This next release is continuing to make dav1d even faster. Dav1d 0.8 is enhancing the performance by employing a picture buffer pool, there is now native support for the Apple Silicon ARM hardware, various ARM32 and ARM64 performance optimizations in general, and more SSE and AVX2 optimizations on the Intel/AMD side. The tentative list of dav1d 0.8 changes can be found here for the imminent update.

Meanwhile SVT-AV1 0.8.6 is also out today. SVT-AV1 is the AV1 encoder that started out as an Intel open-source software project but now is developed under the AOMedia umbrella with their recently established software working group. Today's SVT-AV1 0.8.6 release has various optimizations and improvements to the encoder. There are also bug fixes, improved continuous integration, Address Sanitizer support, and other improvements.