av1gpu v0.7.1

Linux x86_64 and Windows x64 binaries for NVIDIA GPUs from Turing (RTX 20, T4) to Blackwell (RTX 50). They need only the NVIDIA driver; the Windows zips include nvJPEG's DLL. See the README for usage.

Which download

From this release there are two builds per system. Take the CUDA 13 one unless your driver is older than 580.

File	Built with	NVIDIA driver
av1gpu-0.7.1-linux-x86_64.tar.gz	CUDA 13.4	580 or newer
av1gpu-0.7.1-linux-x86_64-cuda12.tar.gz	CUDA 12.9	525 or newer
av1gpu-0.7.1-windows-x86_64.zip	CUDA 13.4	580 or newer
av1gpu-0.7.1-windows-x86_64-cuda12.zip	CUDA 12.9	528 or newer

Both builds give the same files: cmp on 324 outputs on an L4, and the Windows zips match the Linux tarballs.

Fixed

• Slow start-up on Blackwell with driver 615 or newer (#49, #51). From R615 the driver recompiles every Blackwell kernel built by nvcc older than 13.2.2 when it loads, to fix a reconvergence bug (615.71.09 notes). Earlier releases were built with CUDA 12.9, so every start without a warm CUDA compute cache paid for it: 9.3–9.7 s for one JPEG on an RTX PRO 4500, 17 s in the report.
  • The CUDA 13.4 build starts in 1.2–1.4 s on that GPU in every cache state, on drivers 595 and 615.
  • It is also faster on Blackwell: 404–407 MP/s against 351–353 (+14–16 %). On an L4 it is +1–5 %.
  • The -cuda12 builds still get the recompile on Blackwell with 615+. Keep a warm compute cache for them (README, Download).
• JPEGs whose luma has smaller sampling factors than a chroma component (for example Y 1×1 with Cb / Cr 2×2). Luma was repeated instead of upsampled the way libjpeg-turbo does it. It now equals libjpeg-turbo's decode exactly, in 4:2:0 and 4:4:4; on a test photo the AVIF's luma PSNR went from 32.2 to 43.0 dB. JPEGs whose luma has the largest factors, which is nearly all of them, are unchanged: 0 differences on the test sets. (#50, follow-up to #44)

Known limitations

• Windows: its speed was measured with v0.5.0 (67–83 % of Linux) and hasn't been re-run. CPU limits set by job objects or containers aren't read (the thread count follows the process's CPU affinity), and the tests run on Linux only. The CUDA 13 zip was tested on an L4; Windows on Blackwell with driver 615 wasn't (no such driver on AWS).
• GPUs newer than Blackwell first compile the code from PTX, which took over ten minutes in a test. Give av1gpu its own compute cache so it is kept (README, Download).
• PNG and WebP metadata: their ICC profiles and EXIF orientation are not read yet. JPEG profiles are kept, and JPEG orientation is signalled in the AVIF (irot / imir).