FFmpeg HEVC decoding benchmarks
by Niklas Haas on November 8, 2016
Tagged as: mpv, ffmpeg, benchmarks.
Since HEVC software decoding is still very much relevant (especially as hardware decoding chips are both scarce and limited), I decided to compile a few of the benchmark numbers I’ve gotten in the past into a set of graphs.
Performance boost from OpenHEVC intrinsics
These patches still made a very big difference on current git master. Test was done using ffmpeg version N-82299-g0a24587 and this patchset
Interestingly enough, the intra pred SIMD basically made no difference at all, even making the result slightly slower, but the IDCT still helped a lot. Looking at the code, I can’t find an obvious explanation for this - the HEVC intra pred in FFmpeg is still very much C. Perhaps the compiler just does a good job of optimizing here, or perhaps the OpenHEVC intrinsics are just bad.1
Either way, seems like it’s best to keep this patch off. I have adjusted my own FFmpeg patches accordingly.
Time to decode vs. number of threads
In case you’re crazy enough to buy a 16-core machine for video processing, you’re not going to get great results out of software decoding after the first few cores.
Tests were done using ffmpeg version N-82215-g3932ccc with both OpenHEVC intrinsics patches applied.
BBB from the #ffmpeg-devel IRC offers this explanation:
↩︎2016-12-31 16:17:29 @BBB haasn: the reason intra pred simd doesn’t help is b/c most intra pred is dc, and dc is very trivial in c or simd 2016-12-31 16:17:39 @BBB haasn: runtime of dc C vs. idct C is like 1:10 or so 2016-12-31 16:17:57 @BBB haasn: directional intra pred is more complicated, but runs sparsely 2016-12-31 16:18:22 @BBB (from my memory) 2016-12-31 16:52:10 haasn BBB: I did a `perf` and the most time was spent in that hevc_cabac function 2016-12-31 16:52:11 haasn or w/e 2016-12-31 16:55:49 @BBB haasn: yeah that’s residual decoding, that is normal 2016-12-31 16:55:57 @BBB haasn: unfortunately not really simd'able 2016-12-31 16:56:03 @BBB I guess you can try simd’ing the bypass function 2016-12-31 16:56:06 @BBB but that’s hard 2016-12-31 16:56:10 @BBB and I Don’t care about hevc ;)