Rate-Distortion Performance Comparison: VVC vs. HEVC

Video streaming technology along with consumers' need for better video quality have posed major challenges for video encoding systems. Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is the new video coding standard standardized in 2020, to meet the growing demand for high resolution video. Compared to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, VVC aims to provide high bitrate reduction at the same visual quality. In this paper, we provide an in-depth study of the VVC and HEVC standards and evaluate the enhancement in video quality, using both PSNR and bitrate as quality metrics. In these tests, two resolutions (HD and 4K) and some video content were used. The evaluation results prove that, depending on the spatial resolution and the video content, the VVC quality improvement ranges from 32% to 43% over HEVC.