dav1d 0.5.1 Boosts AV1 Video Decode For Older CPUs by 40~50%

While marketed as a point release, the dav1d 0.5.1 "Asiatic Cheetah" release is quite significant for those needing to perform AV1 video decoding on older processors.

With the dav1d 0.5.1 release there is around a 50% speed-up for those using the open-source software on SSE2 CPUs. Meanwhile for older Arm CPUs with ARMv7, there is around a 41% speed-up. There are also "minor" speed improvements for other architectures / instruction sets. Dav1d is already quite well optimized for modern CPUs with AVX and the like, so it's nice to see SSE2 and ARMv7 getting some attention.

More details on dav1d 0.5.1 via VideoLAN.org.

The latest dav1d performance benchmarks for reference can be found via dav1d on OpenBenchmarking.org.