dav1d 1.4 Released With More AVX-512 Optimizations, RISC-V & LoongArch CPU Support

While recent graphics cards support GPU-accelerated AV1 video decoding, for those still relying on dav1d for CPU-based AV1 decode there is now version 1.4 "Road Runner" available that adds support for LoongArch and RISC-V architectures while continuing to further enhance the performance of this open-source AV1 decoder on x86_64 Intel/AMD processors too.

Dav1d 1.4 introduces new AVX-512 optimizations for z1, z2, z3 in 8-bit and high bit-depth modes. This is just the latest of already a lot of Advanced Vector Extensions optimizations over the years to Dav1d. I'll have some new Dav1d CPU benchmarks soon here.

Dav1d 1.4 also adds support for the LoongArch and RISC-V CPU architectures. This will be useful for AV1 decoding on small RISC-V single board computers and other scenarios where GPU-accelerated AV1 decode is not available. This work also includes 8-bit optimizations for LoongArch and ITX optimizations for RISC-V as part of the initial enablement.

The new AV1 decoder release also has threading improvements, a smaller binary size, and fixing a possible integer overflow.

Downloads and more details on the Dav1d 1.4 release via code.videolan.org.