Looking back at dav1d, on a few real world CPUs, we see that low-end CPUs like the Snapdragon 410 still struggle with 1080p decoding. 720p should be very doable though. High-end devices like the Snapdragon 835 can do 1080p decoding at more than 60 fps when spinning up 4 high performance cores. This has an impact on battery life, but for short sequences it shouldn’t matter that much.

Conclusion

dav1d 0.5.0, which will be released this week, is still the fastest AV1 decoder in town. 1080p AV1 decoding is now possible on almost all x86 CPUs thanks to the added SSSE3 assembly and 4K is doable for almost all quad-core CPUs. On the Arm side 720p is possible on low-end devices and 1080p on the high-end, but energy usage has to be considered.

I hope to be able to test energy usage and battery life soon. At the moment I unfortunately don’t have the equipment for it.