SVT-VP9 Is Intel's Latest Open-Source Video Encoder Yielding High Performance VP9

At the start of the month Intel open-sourced SVT-AV1 aiming for high-performance AV1 video encoding on CPUs. That complemented their existing SVT-HEVC encoder for H.265 content and already SVT-AV1 has been seeing nice performance improvements. Intel now has released SVT-VP9 as a speedy open-source VP9 video encoder.

Uploaded on Friday was the initial public open-source commit of SVT-VP9, the Intel Scalable Video Technology VP9 encoder. With this encoder they are focusing on being able to provide real-time encoding of up to two 4Kp60 streams on an Intel Xeon Gold 6140 processor. SVT-VP9 is under a BSD-style license and currently runs on Windows and Linux.

Earlier today I added now the SVT-VP9 test profile for benchmarking this new VP9 encoder via the Phoronix Test Suite. I've been testing SVT-VP9 on a few Intel/AMD Linux systems so far today and the early results are extremely promising.

The performance already for SVT-VP9 is very good, particularly for AVX-512 enabled processors like Xeon Scalable and the X series.

Even with using the same input sample content for VP9 libvpx and enabling the multi-threading options, the vpxenc performance doesn't come close to SVT-VP9 on either the Intel or AMD systems...

With the more mature SVT-HEVC H.265 encoder, the 7980XE / 7960X encode speed was similar to the SVT-VP9 implementation though on the other CPUs the performance varied between these two Intel SVT projects.

To no surprise, SVT-VP9 is much faster than the current state of SVT-AV1.

Overall, the SVT-VP9 performance is off to a very good start and was surprising to see it perform often better than the reference vpxenc. The code to SVT-VP9 can be found on GitHub.