Dav1d 0.8 was released this weekend (and subsequently 0.8.1 too) as the latest major release for this CPU-based AV1 decoder hosted by the VideoLAN project. Dav1d continues to be about offering the best AV1 decode speed and with the v0.8 series are even faster results -- so here are some of our initial data points as well from some weekend benchmarking.

Dav1d 0.8 offers up more optimizations . One of the main optimizations this cycle is the introduction of a picture buffer pool. Under Windows at least the usage of this picture buffer pool can improve performance by up to 10%. There are also more AVX2 and SSE/SSSE3 optimizations too.

Dav1d 0.8 also brings several ARM32 and ARM64 optimizations. But beyond the ARM optimizations is also initial support for Apple Silicon with their ARM-based Apple M1 SoC.

Dav1d 0.8.1 was released as a minor bug fix release to fix a regression stemming from the picture buffer pool. But also a few more ARM32/ARM64 optimizations were also added.

Dav1d 0.8.x can be downloaded via the VideoLAN.org Gitlab .

As a result the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org dav1d test profile has been updated for the new release. This weekend I have been running some comparison benchmarks of dav1d 0.8.1. Below is a look at a few Intel and AMD systems comparing dav1d 0.7 to 0.8.1. More benchmarks including on ARM with the Ampere Altra coming up in the days ahead.




The AMD (Zen 2 / Zen 3) systems tested had the most benefit compared to the Intel boxes. More data on that quick comparison via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file . More benchmarks coming out soon as well as via the dav1d test profile page .