> the main focus of current AV1 development is on speed optimization to make it practical for use in production systems
Remember: first make it work, then make it right, then make it fast. Seems they're only starting the 3rd step now.
But, and it’s hard to understate this, software like x264 has many man years of intricate and clever optimization work under its belt. Just look through some of the development history to see the kind of hoops jumped through and low level clock tick counting tweaks that have been made.
Also, I believe in general the expectations around AV1 have always been set realistically in the sense most are expecting that it will likely always require more compute to achieve a significant portion of any superior compression.
Important as those caveats may be, clearly there is a long way to go and you may still legitimately ask how do we know a 3 orders of magnitude deficit can be made practical?
In truth we don’t know with certainty where it will end up, that is true. However the bet was not made by guessing. There has been lots of investigation and analysis of what kind of implementations may be possible including design review with hardware engineers for that side of things.
So essentially it’s designed to outperform the current state of the art, and some high stakes educated projections have been made that it will become practical within a timeframe that still makes AV1 competitive enough to be a worthwhile value proposition.
x264 is a software-only encoder that provides no hooks into hardware acceleration. Their ffmpeg command line indicates that no hardware acceleration hooks of ffmpeg were used.
[1] https://github.com/webmproject/libvpx/blob/master/CHANGELOG [2] https://gist.github.com/Brainiarc7/24de2edef08866c3040805048... [3] https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libva/commit/?id=fb57f5c15e72c3... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9#Hardware_implementations
I haven't tried AV1 yet, but the only way I was able to encode with x265 in a reasonable amount of time was to shard the job over multiple machines and then join the file back together at the end.