SVT-AV1 as the open-source, CPU-based AV1 encoder that was started by Intel software engineers and now led by the Alliance for Open Media is out this week with the big SVT-AV1 3.0 release. Here’s some details on SVT-AV1 3.0 as well as some initial performance benchmarks for this speedy AV1 encoder, especially on modern Intel and AMD processors.
SVT-AV1 3.0 brings improvements to its API and hence the big version bump. The API has been refreshed to eliminate unused fields and other improvements.
Beyond the API changes that break backwards compatibility, SVT-AV1 3.0 also reowrks some of the encoding presets. On the AV1 encoder side are also a number of new performance optimizations:
– Improved mid and high quality presets quality vs speed tradeoffs for fast-decode 2 mode:
– ~15-25% speedup for M3-M10 at the same quality levels
– ~1% BD-rate improvement for presets M0-M2
– Repositioned the fast-decode 1 mode to produce ~10% decoder cycle reduction vs fast-decode 0 while reducing the BD-rate loss to ~1%
– Further Arm Neon and SVE2 optimizations that improve high bitdepth encoding by an average of 10-25% for 480p-1080p resolutions beyond the architecture-agnostic algorithmic improvements since v2.3.0
– Ported several features from SVT-AV1-SPY fork to further improve the perceptual quality of tune 0 mode
– Added an avif mode to reduce resource utilization when encoding still images
Details on all of the SVT-AV1 3.0 changes can be found via the AOMediaCodec GitHub repository for the SVT-AV1 open-source encoder.
On a System76 Thelio Major workstation powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X, I’ve been running some benchmarks comparing the v2.3 and v3.0 releases using the same build options/software settings and same video inputs. In this straight-forward comparison of SVT-AV1 3.0 compared to the prior release, there are indeed some nice performance improvements observed:
For those interested here are more SVT-AV1 benchmarks coming in across different CPUs.
