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Luca Barbato
Luca Barbato

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A month in rav1e - February

rav1e is an AV1 encoder written in Rust

Here a quick summary of what happened last month. I will try to write a recap every month.

February Summary

We poured lots of work on improving the encoding speed, you may read some details of the journey:

The benchmarks are prepared using speed-levels-rs.

The encoder is using the following settings:

--threads 16 --tiles 16 -l 100 <file> -o <encoded> -s <level>

The source file is Bosphorus from the ultravideo test sequences, the 1080p 10bit version is the 4k 10bit version scaled down, since it is not available on the website.

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Overall our aarch64 support is getting fairly good, but there is still a lot of room for improvement on 8bit.

On the other hand there are 10bit optimizations it that aren't yet available for x86_64. Help in improving our SIMD coverage is very welcome :)

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Digging deeper

x86_64

As expected the memory layout optimization that happened between p20210209 and p20210216 had the largest impact on the speed 0 and 1, while optimizing and tuning the temporal rdo lookahead computation has the largest impact on speed level 9 and 10.

Speed Level p20210209 p20210216 p20210223
0 x1.23 x1.29 x1.30
1 x1.20 x1.24 x1.33
2 x1.08 x1.11 x1.22
3 x1.04 x1.07 x1.25
4 x1.04 x1.06 x1.24
5 x1.05 x1.07 x1.27
6 x1.04 x1.05 x1.37
7 x1.03 x1.06 x1.36
8 x1.04 x1.06 x1.39
9 x1.00 x1.02 x1.52
10 x1.00 x1.01 x1.94

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The x86_64 10bit encoding is behaving similarly. Our SIMD support for it received a large boost in January and there is an ongoing effort to improve it even further in March.

Speed Level p20210209 p20210216 p20210223
0 x1.12 x1.12 x1.17
1 x1.10 x1.11 x1.26
2 x1.04 x1.04 x1.23
3 x1.00 x1.02 x1.28
4 x1.01 x1.02 x1.27
5 x1.02 x1.02 x1.29
6 x1.00 x1.01 x1.37
7 x1.01 x1.01 x1.37
8 x1.00 x1.01 x1.38
9 x0.99 x1.00 x1.50
10 x0.99 x1.00 x1.95

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Aarch64

The impact of the optimizations on aarch64 had been more radical with a fairly large relative improvement on speed 10.

Speed Level p20210209 p20210216 p20210223
0 x1.14 x1.15 x1.31
1 x1.11 x1.10 x1.59
2 x1.03 x1.03 x1.63
3 x1.03 x1.01 x1.76
4 x1.01 x1.01 x1.77
5 x1.02 x1.01 x1.88
6 x1.02 x1.00 x2.07
7 x1.01 x1.00 x2.07
8 x1.02 x1.00 x2.10
9 x1.00 x0.99 x2.45
10 x1.01 x0.98 x4.75

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The 10bit boost is not as extreme, but still substantial.

Speed Level p20210209 p20210216 p20210223
0 x1.13 x1.17 x1.30
1 x1.08 x1.11 x1.54
2 x1.02 x1.05 x1.57
3 x1.00 x1.03 x1.66
4 x1.00 x1.02 x1.67
5 x1.00 x1.03 x1.74
6 x1.00 x1.02 x1.87
7 x1.00 x1.03 x1.87
8 x1.00 x1.02 x1.89
9 x0.99 x1.01 x2.12
10 x0.98 x1.02 x2.96

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I tested on some different aarch64 systems to see if there is a large difference in its behavior.

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The Apple M1 is fairly different, but that's something I would expect. I will talk a bit more about it in other blogposts probably.

Coming next

We already landed additional SIMD for both x86_64 and aarch64, David Barr started working on improving the segment selection and I have eventually came up with the internals architecture that would give us a better thread pool usage while not impacting a lot the overall latency.

March is going to be exciting.

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