Intel Releases SVT-AV1 0.9 For Quicker AV1 Video Encoding

Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media have released SVT-AV1 0.9 with nearly one year worth of changes to this high performance CPU-based AV1 video encoder. SVT-AV1 0.9 is now even faster as shown by our latest benchmarks.

This release of SVT-AV1 was going to be version 0.8.8 and was covered at the end of last year. But they opted for relabeling it as v0.9.0 due to the significant number of changes found with this release.

SVT-AV1 0.9 features a variety of performance optimizations for existing preset levels plus adds new levels 9 through 12. As shown in that earlier Phoronix article and more benchmarks in this article, these new preset articles can really speed up the AV1 video encode process if looking to accomplish very speedy encodes.

In addition to new (higher) presets, SVT-AV1 0.9 is delivering better performance over the prior SVT-AV1 state.

The SVT-AV1 GitLab goes over many of the other changes found in SVT-AV1 0.9. There is also experimental support for higher than 4K resolutions, significant memory reductions, speeding up legacy CPU support with SSE code to complement the corresponding C kernels, changing from BSD 2-clause to BSD 3-clause licensing, and a variety of other improvements.

I powered up a wide mix of distinctly different systems (both hardware and software differences, the intent in looking at the SVT-AV1 0.8.7 vs. 0.9 performance and not comparing directly system vs. system) to see how SVT-AV1 0.9 is looking compared to the prior release on a mix of hardware.

Even with the low presets focused on high quality encoding, SVT-AV1 0.9 was offering better performance than last year's v0.8.7 milestone.

When moving up to the higher preset levels, the gains with SVT-AV1 0.9 were quite compelling for both new and old hardware, both Intel and AMD systems too.

With 1080p content too the gains with SVT-AV1 0.9 were very clear. Such as with the Core i7 5960 Haswell-E system, 1080p AV1 encoding at preset 8 went from 39 FPS to now above 60 FPS (65) with SVT-AV1 0.9.

Levels 0 through 12 are new with SVT-AV1 0.9 and allowed for even faster encodes.

SVT-AV1 0.9 is looking great from the performance angle and its expanded feature set. Downloads and more details on SVT-AV1 0.9 via GitLab. I'll continue running SVT-AV1 0.9 benchmarks on more systems with the svt-av1 PTS/OpenBenchmarking.org test profile.