dav1d 1.0 AV1 Video Decoder Nears Release With AVX-512 Acceleration

Dav1d as the leading CPU-based, open-source AV1 video decoder developed by the VideoLAN project is nearing its v1.0 release.

The dav1d 1.0 milestone should be imminent with preparations underway on marking the significant "1.0" milestone. This follows the project's many 0.x releases where they have incrementally sped up the encoder via supporting additional x86/x86_64 and Arm instruction set extensions and other general optimizations to make for very speedy CPU-based AV1 video decoding.

Thankfully we are beginning to see the latest desktop GPUs supporting AV1 decode while dav1d has a lot of potential still for older hardware lacking AV1 acceleration or other cases of systems lacking appropriate driver support, etc.

Besides delivering on all of the changes made throughout the 0.x releases, dav1d 1.0 is going to be a significant new release in its own right now that they have added AVX-512 support. The big new feature of dav1d 1.0 is support for AVX-512 to complement the project's existing code paths for CPU capabilities ranging from SSE2 up through AVX2. This AVX-512 acceleration new to dav1d 1.0 should help speed up things even more for recent Intel CPUs having support for it (and AVX-512 rumored for AMD Zen 4).

Systems like Intel Ice Lake and Tiger Lake laptops will benefit from dav1d 1.0's AVX-512 acceleration.

Dav1d 1.0 also adds a new grain API and has numerous bug fixes and other improvements. The tentative dav1d 1.0 release notes can be found via VideoLAN's dav1d Git repo. Stay tuned for the formal dav1d 1.0.0 release soon.

I'll have out some fresh CPU benchmarks of dav1d 1.0 when released but for those curious about the current 0.9 performance capabilities across a wide range of processors, see the OpenBenchmarking.org test profile page.