dav1d 0.5.1: more speed!

29 October 2019

A few reminders about dav1d

If you follow this blog, you should know everything about dav1d.

The VideoLAN, VLC and FFmpeg communities have been working on a new AV1 decoder, dav1d, to be the best and fastest decoder.

0.5.1

2 weeks ago, we released dav1d 0.5.0.

With 0.5.0, we showed that we were between 3x and 5x faster than aomdec on desktop CPUs, including 32bit CPUs, and between 2.5x and 3x faster on Android and iOS 64bit phones.

We even showed we were a lot faster than the new gav1 decoder on Android 64bit.

However, there were 2 cases where dav1d was not the best:

  • desktop without SSSE3 capabilities, aka very old CPUs, in single-thread,
  • Android phones in 32bits, in single-thread.

0.5.1 is a small release focused on those cases.

0.5.1 gets up to 50% speed improvements on SSE2 CPUs, which should make dav1d faster than aomdec in all desktop cases, from C to AVX-2.

At the same time, 0.5.1 gets up to 41% speed improvements on ARMv7 CPUs, which makes dav1d at least as fast as gav1.

Of course, in multi-thread, we were already faster :)

So, yes, dav1d is now faster than all the other decoders in all cases.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf