AV1 vs HEVC: battery performance on the Quest 3

14 days ago

Our devs have been analysing the performance of streaming AV1 using DeoVR on the Meta Quest 3 headset. See below for our full findings.

What is AV1?

AV1 provides equal video quality at a lower bit rate. This means a smaller filesize, which in turn means greatly improved streaming properties for high-quality video, reduced bandwidth costs and a major boost for those users with less-than-ideal internet connections.

As well as this vastly improved efficiency, it is open source with a royalty-free algorithm, making it free-to-use for everyone, worldwide.

DeoVR fully supports the new AV1 codec and we’re pleased to see Meta doing a great job bringing AV1 to the Quest 3 and Quest 3S VR headsets. For more information, see our guide to AV1 video and VR article on the DeoVR blog.

Comparing AV1 vs HEVC power consumption

An important test is to look at how AV1 compares to HEVC in terms of impact on the battery.

In very simple terms, we discovered the energy cost for HEVC is 7.5% less than AV1. This means the HEVC codec appears to be more battery-efficient than AV1.

Let’s look at it in more detail.

Media sample:

We used this video - Wonders of Evolution - using the local file playback method.

Codecs and Files:

AV1: 43704_nvenc_4000p_24070kbps.mp4 at 24,070 kbps
HEVC: 43704_hevc_4000p_28394kbps.mp4 at 28,394 kbps

Methodology:

Data sampling:

Duration: 5-minute playback from 0:24 to 6:32
Sampling Interval: Every 5 seconds

Data origin: adb shell dumpsys battery (level, voltage, charge counter and temperature)

Battery usage over time:

HEVC (blue Solid Line) and AV1 (Orange Dashed Line) are now plotted on a normalized scale from 0 to 1, where 0 represents the minimum battery usage and 1 represents the maximum usage within each dataset.

The AV1 line consistently remains higher in normalized usage, reaffirming that it draws more power overall compared to HEVC across the playback duration.

Battery Usage (mAh):

HEVC: 144.08 mAh
AV1: 155.71 mAh
Observation: The AV1 video consumed approximately 11.63 mAh more than the HEVC video, indicating slightly higher power consumption.

Battery Efficiency: HEVC appears to be more battery-efficient than AV1 in this sample.

Overall: The test shows that HEVC offers better battery efficiency than AV1 on the Quest 3 device, using approximately 7.5% less power over the same video playback period.

Energy Cost per Bitrate

This chart shows the Total Energy Cost per Bitrate (mAh/kbps) for HEVC and AV1.

HEVC: Shows a lower energy cost per bitrate, indicating it is more efficient in terms of battery consumption per unit of data processed
AV1: Has a higher energy cost per bitrate, suggesting slightly higher power usage relative to its data rate

What next?

The next step will be seeing VR cameras encode with AV1 on the device - this is when we will see other productivity benefits.

According to firmware logs, Meta is constantly improving the way these headsets decode AV1 video. GPU overlocking in the v71 update may have a major effect on these results.

Join the discussion at the DeoVR forum, Facebook and Reddit.