AV1 UHD FFMetrics Compared

[ir_cow]

I finally gotten around to testing AV1 4K HDR encoding and didn't know what good bitrates would be to preserve quality.

So far I've done a batch of tests in Handbreak in a complex scene and compared in FFMetrics to highest bitrate on slowest speed possible settings for NVENC.

CPU encode would be better because the file size is half, but for now even with a 14900K, I'm getting 0.8-5 FPS on a single pas. Very impractical.

RTX 4090 AV1 Encode 102-130 FPS
14900K AV1 Encode (P3) 1-5 FPS
RTX 4090 H.265 Encode 450+ FPS
14900K H.264 Encode (P1) 19 FPS

So far best from a size perspective is AV-QC-30-P3 (CPU), but it would take 30+ hours to complete 2hr runtime. Some minor tweaking and AV1-QC32-P6 (NV) is the next best for time and size.

AV1-QC-P (Codec / Constant Quality / Preset ) - Lower # = Better

UHD FFMetrics	PSNR	SSIM	VMAF	Size - 5 Min
AV1-QC0-P0 (NV) (Reference)	Inf	100	100	1.4 GB
AV1-QC30-P6 (NV)	40.35	.9909	94.79	359 MB
AV1-QC30-P6 (CPU)	40.14	.9885	93.15	135 MB
AV1-QC30-P3 (CPU)	40.19	.9890	93.59	134 MB
AV1-QC32-P6 (NV)	40.27	.9899	94.09	271 MB
AV1-QC45-P4 (NV)	39.36	.9799	85.86	58.7 MB
H265-QC15-P6 (NV)	40.10	.9888	93.88	343 MB
H265-QC30-P6 (NV)			89.33	97 MB
H264-RF15-P0 (CPU)	40.19	.9887	94.71	662 MB

VMAF 93-95 Target

 

[ir_cow]

Went back and did it for 1080P. Looks like NV is still QC30-P0 and CPU is QC26-P6 for AV1. CPU saves 30MB, but its only 45 FPS vs the 400+ on the GPU.