HEIC vs AVIF Benchmark
This page shows the quality, compression factor, and encoding time for HEIC using the x265 encoder compared to different AVIF encoders.
The image used in these tests was
dsc_1385.jpg.
Resolution of this image is 4288x2848 pixels. You can use the image file to reproduce these experiments.
PSNR values were computed with the heif-enc --benchmark option. The PSNR is computed on the luminance channel only.
The encoders used were:
- x265 v3.5
- AOM v3.3.0
- SVT-AV1 v1.2.1
I have omitted the rav1e encoder. See the the AVIF encoder benchmark for rav1e results.
All tests were run on an i7-4770K @3.50 GHz.
We first show the rate-distortion curves for different speed presets of x265. The numbers along the curve are the encoding times in seconds.
As can be seen, only the three presets ultrafast, superfast, slow are relevant for still image coding, since the other presets give almost identical results.
In order to compare the execution speed between HEIC and AVIF, I have selected the 'slow' preset for HEIC and selected speed settings for the AVIF encoders to match this as close as possible.
It shows that HEIC and SVT-AV1 are very close in speed, with HEIC being slightly faster. AOM is about 2x slower.
Finally, we show the encoder performance with each encoder set to the maximum speed settings. At the fastest speed settings, HEIC/x265 gives better compression at a lower computational complexity then the AVIF encoders. AOM can encode a bit faster at its fastest setting (speed=9) than x265, but at a considerably lower quality. Hence I think that AOM at speed=8 is the fair comparison to x265 at ultrafast.
