SVT-AV1 4.0 Released With More Performance Optimizations

Written by Michael Larabel in Multimedia on 25 January 2026 at 05:38 AM EST. 11 Comments

SVT-AV1 4.0 is out as the newest major feature release for this open-source AV1 video encoder that was originally started by Intel as an open-source project and now continuining on thanks to the Alliance For Open Media.

SVT-AV1 4.0 brings some API updates and with the breakage there yields the new 4.0 version. Exciting end-users though will be the continued performance improvements, ARM optimizations, and more with SVT-AV1 4.0:

- Significant improvements in AVIF and still image modes
~5-8x speedup M11-M0 at the same quality levels with tune MS-SSIM
~5-8% BD-Rate improvements at the same complexity with tune MS-SSIM
- Tradeoff improvements for the RTC modes:
~5-15% speedup at similar quality levels in --rtc mode across presets 7 - 11
- Tradeoff improvements for the Random Access mode (VOD use case) showing a 10-25% speedup across presets M7 down to M0 for --fast-decode 1 and 2
- Major feature updates for the visual quality mode with the completion porting all SVT-AV1-PSY applicable features for --tune vq for video and --tune iq for avif:
Added AC Bias, a psychovisual feature that improves detail preservation and film grain retention
- Update S-Frame support to allow setting it in a specific decode order option and with more qp options
- Further Arm Neon and SVE2 optimizations that improve high bitdepth encoding by an average of ~5% in low resolutions

Some nice improvements there. There are also some bug fixes and other improvements too. Downloads and more details on SVT-AV1 4.0 via AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1 GitLab. New SVT-AV1 benchmarks soon.